Photoshop Elements is a really incredible package. You get a lot of the tools found in its big brother—including healing brushes and the new Quick Select tool—along with several of the filters. In fact, unless you’re doing high-end professional photo editing, PSE9 likely has every tool you’re going to need to correct and crop your photos. For $100, you’re getting the full version of Photoshop from a few years ago, and that ain’t bad.

What if you have a great image that is just in the wrong file format? For instance, you have a TIFF that needs to be a JPEG because your mom’s old e-mail program is having trouble reading it. Or, you want to shrink down a GIF in a word processing program without crunchy pixelation. You don’t need to buy Photoshop or any other image editing program. Preview can do it for you for free. Just follow these steps:

Adobe has been bringing us Photoshop Elements. This is a friendlier image manipulation program. Cheaper. You don’t get nearly the amount of power and control you get with Photoshop, but you do get enough to have some fun and produce some very cool images. With this iteration, Adobe has not only added some great new editing tools, by also improved the way you organize and share your photos, as well.

I must say that Comic Touch is a very unique application for the iPhone/iPod touch, and does a very good job at editing and adding comical effects to pictures directly on the iPhone or iPod touch. Comic Touch is a mixture of plasq’s two other apps for Mac OS X—Skitch and Comic Life—as it allows users to edit images with a variety of different effects, including Bulge, Dent, Squeeze, Stretch, and Light. It also offers the ability to add speech bubbles and captions to a photo to give it the feel of a comic.

Learn more after the break.

Looking for a powerful image editing solution but don’t want the hefty price tag? Well, Nolobe has just released a brand new image editor for your Mac, called Iris, which promises to do just that.

“Iris has been created for previously overlooked Mac owners who simply wanted an accessible and easy to use image program that provides professional results, without the professional price tag,” explained Matthew Drayton, founder and CEO of Nolobe.

Touted as “The ultimate image editor for Mac OS X,” Iris promises to provide a powerful, intuitive, easy-to-use solution for all of your image editing needs. Read on for features and download information.

Apple today released Aperture 2.1, a great update that includes not only bug fixes, but some great new features as well.

From Software Update:

Aperture 2.1 updates various features of the application and addresses issues related to performance and overall stability. The updates include the following:

Dodge & Burn Plug-in. A sample plug-in is pre-installed, taking advantage of the Edit API introduced in Aperture 2.0. The plug-in adds brush-based tools for Dodge (Lighten), Burn (Darken), Contrast, Saturation, Sharpen and Blur.Customize Default Adjustment Set. You can now specify which adjustments appear by default in the Adjustments Inspector/HUD.Updated Crop Tool. A simplified UI makes it easier to preserve an image’s original aspect ratio, match the aspect ratio of your display, or use one of the standard preset aspect ratios.Sorting in All Projects View. A contextual menu allows you to sort the All Projects view in ascending or descending date order.Show on Map. A contextual menu allows you to choose the Show on Map by right-clicking (or Control-clicking) on an image that contains GPS data.Access to Toolbar on Second Display. When using multiple displays in Full Screen mode, the Full Screen toolbar is now accessible on a second display.

More after the jump.