If you take a lot of digital pictures (or just have a lot of them stored on your harddrive), you can’t go wrong with Google’s Picasa 2. Picasa 2 is a great image management application that catalogs your pictures (videos, too) using a handy interface. There are also image touch-up tools built in (rotation, resizing, automatic and manual color correction, redeye reduction and even some effects like soft focus and sepia tone). Now of course these editing tools are limited, and nowhere near as complex as those found in paint packages like Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop or even freeware packages like Gimp, but having them available in Picasa is a nice touch. The automatic adjustments like contrast and color correction produce some very nice results.
Picasa 2 also allows you to e-mail and print photos, create a nifty collage/poster, publish photos to a Blogger blog, order prints through a few different services and even create image galleries that can easily be published on the web. The default gallery designs are somewhat limited, but since they use CSS, I was able to easily edit them to match the theme of my site.