There is always lightroom which was designed as photographer friendly vs photoshop, it handles RAW, I hate it's front end indexing library catalog feature ... just want to take an image in , work on it and save it back to the folder it came from with a modified name. Lightroom is great, split toning and graduated ND filter can work wonders and there are probably many other good things I haven't used yet. Graphics programs are like word processors .... you use what you need
There is always lightroom which was designed as photographer friendly vs photoshop, it handles RAW, I hate it's front end indexing library catalog feature ... just want to take an image in , work on it and save it back to the folder it came from with a modified name. Lightroom is great, split toning and graduated ND filter can work wonders and there are probably many other good things I haven't used yet. Graphics programs are like word processors .... you use what you need
Fuji s100 fs and my wife has an HS-10. own a few others like D90 bur the s100 gives photos that are great by my standards, the imager size gives a sweet spot combination of depth of field, resoultion etc as is evidenced by the s-1 and others maintaining the same size. The lack of interchangeable lenses is eliminated by the one on the camera. A full kit is the camera, extra battery, and a couple of polarizers. forget "bridge" and look at a "swiss army knife" or even ultimate camera. Used and owned Fuji, pentax, minolta, nikon SLR systems with film and the S100 shines. Also still own giant rangefinder fuji GL690.
I used acer netbook. download from SD card directly using the "my computer" and place in directory named by day or place, use Fastone viewer which has a neat instant magnify to check details. Phone calls out on skype is often 2 cents a minute to any phone or free to computers. Bring a mini hard drive for backup and store it well away from the computer to avoid theft taking everything. Pictures are worth way more than laptops shen you factor in air fare and lodgings. More recently used larger acer laptop because of processing power for panoramas.
The best free program is Fastone Viewer which has many features that are associated with photoshop ie adjusting color, reading exif, resizing, cloning, fancy borders, change to black and white, sepia toning and lots more. Just download and play with it. I also use Corel Photo Paint because it comes with Coreldraw which I use anyway and has most of the functionality of any bitmap editing software.