Photo editing software for a beginner?

I just bought a Nikon 3100 camera (nothing professional just for pictures of my kids playing sports.) Anyways, I wanted to know what kind of software I could download for free or purchase to zoom in on photos and save them zoomed in.

Would photo shop be to advanced for a beginner like me?

Photoshop isn't really complicated if your objective is basically zooming and saving it a is. Since you want something that's free, I'd suggest GIMP cause it's basically the same except for the fact that it's free.

Photoshop is a 'professional tool' with a lot of bells and whistles. To really learn it would take some time and effort. There are simpler versions of Photoshop, like Photoshop Elements, that have fewer features, but only the ones you'd actually use, plus they're a lot cheaper. And there are other photo editing programs, and probably any of them would do what you want. (You're talking about 'cropping', but you might also want to adjust brightness and contrast, maybe touch up the color, etc. Almost any photo you take will benefit from some of these simple things, and they're easy to do.)

There's a free program called GIMP--GNU Image Manipulation Program--that has lots of features. It's open source so you know there's no funny stuff in there. I hear good things about it, but the user interface is a little weird. The nice thing is that it's free, so you don't mind getting a lot more features than you will use. Plus if you get interested in it and want to learn some more complicated tricks you can get a book on it.

Because it was the standard software for a sports website that I shoot for, I've used Picasa (from Google) for several years. Through it's many updates, it's added features, but has always been an easy-to-learn photo editor that has a few special advantages.

First of all, it's free.
Second, Google + will host many of your images in their cloud at no cost, and Google offers data storage upgrades at very reasonable prices.
Third, it has all the basics such as auto color balance, lightning darker images, adjusting color saturations, straightening crooked images, enlarging and reducing and cropping horizontally and vertically using many standard image ratios.

It allows you to put watermarks on your images for copyright purposes, and gives you (via Google +) a very easy way to distribute your newly created albums to friends and families.

Picasa now has the ability to create and print off collages, as well as help you create gift photo cd's (with the option of a slideshow).

And, did I mention that it's free?

http://picasa.google.com