Digital camera. Now what?

Now that I had finally purchased my first digital camera, and took
some pictures, I looked for some cool things I could do with the image
files.

How about editing them with gimp2?

If you run a recent Linux distribution (e.g., ubuntu), most
likely, it already pre-installs GIMP for you. For the rest of us,
installing GIMP 2.2.8 on Windows was fairly straight-forward. The
stuff you need to download can all be found
here. You will need to first download, unzip, and run the install of the GTK+ Runtime Environment (the graphical library that GIMP uses). Then, you need to do the same for the GIMP for Windows Installer. While there, you may as well download the GIMP Help package file (the on-line GIMP help file).

For someone like me who was not much of a graphic artist,
and did not have much experience with drawing software, it took some getting used to before I became somewhat proficient. The best way to learn was probably go through the excellent tutorials on
the web site. Of special interest to me was the Photo Editing section
of tutorials. A quick search on google listed many other tutorials on
gimp.

I found the time invested in learning GIMP was well worth it. Happy photo-editing!