Hi Lyn: Thanks!!  Yes, don't I wish.  It's in County Galway in Ireland.  That's the shot my DH was in.  I wanted photographic evidence to dispute his claim that he's not Irish.  But then again, getting back to the topic of altering photos, I guess there's no such thing as photographic evidence anymore.  lol

I always alter my photos just to correct levels etc usually and crop and resize it normally.Im pretty familiar with photoshop elements being as I sell textures on a well known 3d site.

For textures you need totally even lighting which invariably means a cloudy day with bad light.

I dont see anything wrong with making it better, its the end result that counts after all.Could be why some of my pics are perspective corrected etc

Good tip Mark. Just tried it & it worked well.

Thank you. 

I always ''alter'' my photos. Sometimes just a little, sometimes to an almost ridiculous degree, depending on how I feel or what I want to do. After all, the camera records a 2 dimensional depiction in one diorection only of a 3D world, and all cameras and optics are imperfect to start with. Plus, the settings on an SLR are somewhat arbitrary according to taste. So, to not alter photos further on account of some idea of ''cheating'' I find rather silly.

Being a mathemetician, and a reasonably good s/w writer, I also dream up my own weird alterations which cannot be done at all in Photoshop, or any of the other commercially available packages which I don't possess anyway. Most sharpening/contrast/saturation/grey-scale alterations I do are made with my own home-made software, so it does exactly what I want it to do according to the underlying rather complicated mathematics. 

Yep, so did I. I liked it!

These are two of my fave books on the subject: 

Scott Kelby's 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop and The Adobe Photoshop CS3 Book for Digital Photographers 

A clever avatar, Rod ;-)

Your website is really interesting, Tony ....do you happen to have anything for the Mac too in your bag of tools?:)

Wow and Hello Maria

Thanks for the comment about my avator Maria.

I have a book called "Top 100 Simplified Tips & Tricks - Adobe Photoshop CS3" which is rather good to refer to when I start to wonder how to treat a shot. Plus, with me, I have to learn by my mistakes and try things a few times before anything seeps into my ever decreasing number of grey cells.