Convert a Canon point & shoot into a super camera

"If you're using a consumer grade point-and-shoot Canon digital camera, you've got hardware in hand that can support advanced features way beyond what shipped in the box. With the help of a free, open source project called CHDK, you can get features like RAW shooting mode, live RGB histograms, motion-detection, time-lapse, and even games on your existing camera. Let's transform your point-and-shoot into a super camera just by adding a little special sauce to its firmware."

Read the full article here.

Using Adobe Camera RAW (ACR)

Photoscape

I just added this to the list of links. Here is a description from PC World.

"Photoscape includes everything from a file viewer to a photo editor, slide show creator, batch editor, screen capture program, and more.

Here's yet one more remarkable free piece of software that any self-respecting digital photographer needs on his or her hard disk. There's no possible way to begin to describe the wide range of tools and features this one has--there's everything from a file viewer to a photo editor, slide show creator, batch editor, screen capture program, and more. There are some quite original and innovative tools here, such as combining multiple photos in a single frame. There's also a small, but extremely useful tool--it will take photos that are in the RAW format used by many digital cameras, and convert them to JPG, so that they're more useful.

Even though this program is free, by the way, the creator will take donations if you find Photoscape useful. Pay via Paypal. Given the quality of this software, if you keep using it, consider making a donation."