texaseve Loc: TX, NC and NH

I agree with PS Elements, or the Adobe package with Lightroom & PS together. The best help I had was watching classes on CreativeLive - so much information on many subjects. The most important rule about Lightroom is to operate your file system within Lightroom, or it and you will get confused by it. I found Lightroom fairly easy to navigate when it came to editing, and you can do a lot right there, without going in to PS, although it is available if needed.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Adobe Photography Plan is $9.99 per month for the lowest tier of it.

I've subscribed for five years and love it. Before that, I used stand-alone versions until they were no longer available. The subscription is the better deal, surprisingly.

henryf Loc: Florida

I don't have any friends but I do use Affinity and I like it alot. In the past (ie.V1) it has often appeared onsale for $25 (one time purchase) It is yours forever. Now they are on to V.2 They may come down to $25 again. Affinity says that they have no planes to deprecate V1.

BTW, I started out using PSP. In my opinion, Affinity is a much better option. Corel continually hounded me to make additional purchases etc. Serif leaves me alone.

I found that progressing on the Affinity learning curve was very rewarding...lots of youtube videos etc.

Good luck

Real Nikon Lover Loc: Simi Valley, CA

Of all the programs I use, I found a free version of "ON1" and it offers simple to apply templates. Don't limit yourself because you are 66. I am the same age and started tinkering with PCs in 1985. A few years back my 90 year old Great Aunt wanted to learn how to use a PC. She bought one and I got her hooked up and off she went. Next thing I know she was in chat rooms, talking to family, making new friends, sending and receiving photos, doing her banking. She passed at 101 years and was on the PC up until about 3 months before she left us. :) You can do what you put your mind to.

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Debbie, you don't say whether you use a Mac or Windows. In my earlier post, I recommended the Adobe Photography Plan, which works on either. Others have mentioned Serif's Affinity Photo, which is excellent for its price. It also works on Macs, PCs, and iPads.

IF you are a Mac user, it comes with Photos, a combination photo database and editor that is basic and easy to learn, but still powerful. Photos also runs on iPads and iPhones and they all share the same images through Apple's iCloud service.

Also available to Mac users is Raw Power, a raw file editor that can be a stand-alone program, or used as a plug-in with Photos OR Affinity Photo. Raw Power is about a $40 one-time expense. Photos is free with every Apple Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Affinity Photo is $41 until January 25. The whole suite of Serif Affinity Photo 2, Publisher 2, and Designer 2 is $100 until January 25, as well.

John H. Loc: Central Washington State

I use GIMP mostly to add things such as stars, circles, and ovals (+some text) to images that I will then send to friends with a message: Exp ~~ At the red star, note ...; or ~~ Note the green oval showing where to park your truck.
I don't think it will be a good photo package for anyone, but it is free.

dkburrows72 Loc: Lake George, NY

I would agree that Photoshop has a pretty steep learning curve. However, should be pretty easy to learn the basics of Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. The learning curve for Lightroom is much easier. You can do a lot by just importing your photos and playing around with the sliders. I would at least do the free trial and see what you think.

Drbobcameraguy Loc: Eaton Ohio

Also the program supplied by your camera manufacturer usually works simply and fast free and in my experience I get great prints from NX studio. I do it se affinity photo for the extreme or creative editing but studio works excellent for the normal edits.

goldenyears Loc: Lake Osewgo

I also didn't feel I had enough time to learn to use a very sophisticated photo editor. So, I purchased Luminar AI because it looked like it would be easy to learn how to use it. Proved to be true. I think it is a very intuitive program, with a simple user interface. Luminar AI has an "Erase" function that works well to remove unwanted items.

I suggest keeping the editing programs you use now if you do get another editor. I still use programs I bought twenty years ago for certain functions.

I recently purchased Topaz Gigapixel and use that often to prepare old small-sized images for editing with Luminar AI.

SteveInConverse Loc: South Texas

Great bird shot by the way! Honestly, to me, the chain is ok as it's not overwhelming the subject.

Dennis833 Loc: Australia

Another vote for Affinity Photo. I used Photoshop for many years before making the switch to Affinity and this program does everything I need including an excellent soft proofing feature. Don't waste your time trying any of those free programs.

cahale Loc: San Angelo, TX

While "free" software will do some of what you want, it is usually worth just what you pay for it. I use Adobe Elements as my main editing tool. I have an aversion to paying for software over and over, and Elements has all the tools most of us need. The newest version of Elements would last you 10 years if you do not have attacks of "newer is better" itis. It has three levels of use, "Quick," "Guided," and "Expert." It is not difficult to learn the basic tools to improve the quality of your work, and you can gradually move to more esoteric functions if you wish. Good luck with your hunt.

cahale Loc: San Angelo, TX

By the way, post a downloadable copy of the bird shot, and I will show you how to remove the chains.

Twigphoto Loc: Maryland, USA

I would suggest Affinity Photo 2. Costs about $50, but at times they offer 1/2 off discounts. Has most of the features that you find in Photoshop. Software up dates are made at no charge.

neillaubenthal

I second DWU2…the 10 bucks a month for the Adobe plan is outstanding…and to be honest you will be able to do almost everything you want to do within Lightroom and not actually have to use Photoshop even though you'll have it available. Lightroom Classic is computer based but will sync various folders and collections and whatnot to the cloud so you can look at it on a web browser, smart phone, or tablet. Lightroom is internet based although it's included in the Adobe plan but currently it is less capable than the classic version of LR and isn't much use unless you have an internet connection. There are tablet and smartphone versions of Lightroom to allow you to do limited editing and display photos as well that connect to your Adobe plan. From your description of your needs…you'll not really need to use Photoshop and the learning curve in LR is a lot less…especially if you view some of the free tutorials on YouTube, if you go that way we can recommend some folks to go learn from. The other big thing you get from Lightroom is it's a photo management and library organization application…I don't know how you're doing the storage, viewing and processing work now but having it all integrated into the Lightroom catalog makes things a lot easier. If you've ever used Photos on Apple products or whatever the equivalent on Windows or Android is then you've got the basic idea of what the image manager does but LR provides a lot more capabilities that are relatively easy to learn (compared to Photoshop which is more powerful but harder and more obtuse and for the most part not really needed by most of us) for editing and producing your final output.

I see that several folks have suggested Photoshop Elements and/or GIMP. The latter is a serious learning curve and the former is essentially Photoshop Light…but neither of them really provides any image library management capabilities…one can do this with named folders or various other ways but if you're looking for all the images you ever took of say a Red Bellied Woodpecker then folders don't help and neither do PS or Elements or GIMP…but LR and it's keywords make showing all of them to you on one pane trivial then you pick the one you want, do whatever corrections you like…and frequently all that is necessary is hitting the Auto button but you can use the sliders to correct exposure, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, contrast, sharpening, noise reduction, etc and see the results real time on the screen so you know when you've got enough of whatever it is for whater you're trying to achieve.

I've been on the Adobe plan for probably 5 or 6 years now and was using Apple's Aperture management app before that…and although I have Photoshop installed I really don't use it much as LR does the vast majority of what the vast majority of us need. PS is down about 5th or 6th on my list of most used photo apps…after LR comes a noise reduction app which gets run on the image first…either DxO or Topaz is fine for this, and then Topaz Sharpening because it's a bit more sophisticated than the sharpening that LR does but it still has auto help me modes so you don't need to be an expert to use it.