overwhelmed

i just purchased a c-7070 and will be taking photos with no strobe for now. so i guess i will be dealing mainly with macro stuff to avoid backscatter. anyway, i have so many questions. i have a basic knowledge of landscape/nature photography but am really deficient concerning photo processing and settings for underwater photography with no strobes (can't afford atm). i am also particularly interested in shooting RAW but am woefully deficient concering the knowledge to process these images. i am enrolled to take the PADI course but the course has a bent towards film photography and seems a little dated. anyway, here are a few of my questions.

1. where can i find a tutorial concerning settings for my camera without strobes?

2. where can i find a tutorial for processing? i know some basics such as setting white, gray, and black points but really don't understand what i'm doing. i'd like to avoid photoshop due to the price tag and i'm not interested in spending oodles of time tweaking my photos (i am no professional and don't plan on becoming one).

3. what's a good RAW converter for the C-7070? i've read that the bundled converter is crap. i've also heard that photoshop elements 3.0 does not work in the "native" RAW environment. CaptureOne Pro is too pricey.

in summary, i'm a newb, i feel overwhelmed, and would appreciate any help concerning how to get started taking decent underwater photos.

thanks in advance,

andy

This may help: http://www.ikelite.com/web_pages/gide_o5060.html

Andy,

Welcome to Wetpixel.

As far as your question on processing. As you know, Photoshop CS is rather pricey. You might want to look at Photoshop Elements instead. Much more reasonably priced and offers a lot of tools for processing. Granted, you can't do as much in Elements as the full blown CS version, but just starting out, I think Elements will suit your needs. The manual that comes with Elements can be a little overwhelming at first. Look at the tutorial books by Scott Kelby. He has a series of books out on the subject that are at most book stores. He gives practical and easy to understand steps for a number of common processing tasks. Obviously, there are other books as well, but I found his to be a big help to me when just starting out.

Hope this helps.