Free Image Editing Software

 

There are some great - and free - digital photo editing software programs available online. Now, since these are free, you typically have to endure some advertisement viewing or regular pitches to upgrade to a more advanced editor that, as you might imagine, actually costs money. But there are certain ones that work so well that they are more than worth the cost of a little possible annoyance.

 

One of the most often recommended free digital photo editors is the PhotoScape for Windows photo editor. The Viewer is nothing to write home about, but in the Editor you find some really upscale functions. You get one-click auto levels, you get to load and save presets, you get advanced color curves, you get a wide array of color-adjustment options. You can engage in noise reduction or you can make cartoons. You can even toy with many different photo frames for adding even more to your creative process. As if that's not enough, you can add in shapes, cartoon speech balloons, other text, and clip art or other photos or images that you have saved to your clipboard. You get region editing tools like mosaic and red eye removal, and you have access to a highly flexible circular editing tool. It's really quite amazing how much is packed into this part of PhotoScape. Oh, and don't worry--if you make a mistake or change your mind about some editing that you did, you can Undo as far back as you need or desire.

 

The flaws of PhotoScape for Windows are that you don't have all that much to work with as far as pixel editing goes, and sometimes the operating instructions for the different modules aren't all that clear.

 

After PhotoScape for Windows, I really like GIMP. Many people consider GIMP to be the most powerful free tool of its kind that anyone can find today. What GIMP is, is a bitmap- and pixel- based image manipulation software program through which you can retouch and edit your photos while also being able to create animations and non-photographed images. GIMP has a large toolbox, and it also supports a vast array of file formats for displaying or exporting. Here's what the GIMP designers have to say about it: "GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted."

 

GIMP is not perfect though. It is difficult to master for the average person, and it sorely lacks a smooth workflow arrangement for moving between features and modules. There are also some really important photo editing features that are left out of this software program altogether: customized shapes, macros (actions), 16-bit per channel color support, layer groups, clipping layers, adjustment layers, CMYK, and HDR.

 

After these two software programs, you can look into Paint.NET, which was originally designed for Windows XP operating system. The publishers of Paint.NET tell us: "Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple tool for photo and image editing."

 

As far as I know at the time of this writing, Paint.NET 3.0 Alpha is the most advanced and most updated version of Paint.NET. If you find any versions that are numbered higher than 3.0 they're the ones you want. Otherwise, take 3.0. Paint.NET is more limited in its total applications than either GIMP or PhotoScape for Windows, but at the same time it's quite easy to use and can be learned quickly. For many digital photographers, that's what matters the most, at least when they are just learning this kind of software.

 

So, these are my top three picks for digital photo editing software. There are many more free programs out there, so if you try these out and think you are missing something in them, you should look up some others and try them out. If you get really serious about your digital photography, buying a program will be your best bet.