Adobe Photoshop CS5 is quite the pricey beast. It does a lot of different things and isn't only used for photos: illustrations, painting, and some 3D and video work. You may not be using all of those features, but would like to be able to edit your images to look nice and professional.

First, Adobe has your back: Photoshop Elements. It may not be everything that Photoshop CS5 is, but it is just as capable as making adjustments to your images. Need to adjust brightness, contrast, or saturation? Elements is more than capable of doing that. Like its big brother, Photoshop Elements is also able to import RAW images taken with your camera. Now there are a few things that elements will not be able to help you with, but those features are geared to a more professional crowd. Photoshop Elements is available for both the Windows and Mac platforms.

Another photo editing option from Adobe is Photoshop Lightroom 3. For most professional photographers Lightroom is a stepping stone from capture to final work in Photoshop. Lightroom organizes your images in a library that can be tagged and organized in a manner that suits you. The Develop section of Lightroom is essentially the Adobe Camera RAW plugin. You can make adjustment to exposure, contrast, or things such as chromatic aberration and sharpening. The best part is that all the changes that you make are non-destructive, meaning that if you adjust the exposure, you will be able to change it at any time. This is because all of the edits made to your images are stored in a database separate from the photos. There are some features in Lightroom that are not found in Elements, such as layers or CMYK profiles. Photoshop Lightroom is available for both the Windows and Mac platforms.

The next option is a nifty program called Pixelmator. It is Mac only, but at $59 it is well worth the purchase. Similar to elements, Pixelmator allows you to make adjustments to your photographs as well adding any creative enhancements to your images. Set up in an easy-to-use layout, Pixelmator offers you access to layers, the ability to create masks for editing certain areas of your photos while keeping other areas untouched. Pixelmator is also capable of importing RAW images, but that function is limited to the RAW files that are supported by Mac OS X.

Another Mac only solution is provided by Apple: Aperture. Aperture is almost identical in function to Adobe’s Lightroom in that it acts as a stepping stone to other photo manipulation software. There are features offered by Aperture that are not seen in Lightroom: greater geotagging support, the ability to order books with your photos inside, and face recognition. With those exceptions they are essentially the same products, and since both companies offer a demo of each program, you can try both out to see which will be better for you.

My final suggestion is GIMP. GIMP stands for the GNU Image Manipulation Program, and is available for almost every platform: Windows, Mac, even Linux. As a matter of fact, GIMP started its life out on Linux and was ported over to the other two platforms. Because it is part of the GNU project, GIMP is free. While not as hefty as Photoshop, GIMP is suited to making changes to photographs, as well as being able to create other kinds of images. GIMP is able to import RAW images, but because it is an open source program, updates may not come as frequently as they would with the other programs - though on occasion, new RAW updates are provided before Adobe is able to release an update.

There are plenty of other free and paid alternatives, but this list was composed of the programs and their features with which I am familiar. If you have any other alternatives to Photoshop, be sure to leave them in the comments. Remember, it's good to share your knowledge and experience with others; it helps everyone grow.