Hello from the Illinois-Wisconsin Region

[SamSaladino]

I live in Northern Illinois, but only about 1 1/2 blocks south of the Wisconsin State Line. My primary interest is Wildlife and Nature shots. I've only had my DSLR for a couple of years now, before that a couple of point and shoot digitals and before that numerous film cameras in a variety of formats for numerous years, so yes I'm an old coot. Even so my enjoyment of photography continues to grow. In a way I'm glad winter is just around the corner so I can finally find some time to sit down and start to really learn some digital editing, which right now I'm a pretty raw noob in trying to figure out exactly what to do and what NOT to do. I've also been experimenting with some HDR in recent months and pretty happy with some of the results I've achieved.

Currently I am using the Corel Paint Shop Pro x3 for an editor, as I can't afford Photoshop at it's out-of-my-budget pricing. I "THINK" I do still have a copy of Photoshop Elements around here but haven't used it for some time. The one problem, if there's any Corel users out there, is I can't always get the pictures as sharp as I want in Corel. I also have Irfanview a free editor that seems to do a better job of sharpening the pics than Corel does. Any tips or suggestions of what I may be doing wrong with the Corel would be greatly appreciated.