I was using Photoshop 5 lite for a while but it was very limited, could only manipulate 8-bit data. You really need 16-bit to stretch a raw image properly. Just recently, I got CS3 on Ebay for less than $400 so you could consider that.
I've never used anything other than Photoshop, there's a lot of other image processing utilities out there, I'm sure others will tell you all about them.
Cheers,
Rob
|