I thought we could start a thread advocating freeware and shareware tools and software that we have found useful. Here's a couple of favourites...
One of the most useful tools I have for my photography is a piece of software called Neat Image. It's a very clever way of removing noise from digital images. The free version lets you remove noise from single images. There are pay versions, but they mainly offer productivity enhancements.
http://www.neatimage.com/
Another thing worth checking out is an almost disturbingly intelligent piece of software called Autostitch. You've probably seen software before where one takes several photos and then goes through a lengthy process of resizing, warping and matching the photos to create a panorama. Autostitch does all of that work for you, and (certainly in my case) better than you can. It really has to be seen to be believed. There is a limited time demo, but you just need to reinstall it once the time has run out. It's here:
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html
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