Free Image Editing Software

I go through spurts of photo editing: granddaughter, other family, nature stuff in season, travel shots, etc. Most folks with a digital camera or scanner have a need to do so occasionally.

We all know that the photo-editing application ne plus ultra is PhotoShop. Those of us who’ve tried it also know that it’s got a steep learning curve and costs to high heaven. (Yes, I know that you can get it free on peer-sharing sites; those are your ethics, and I guess you have to live with ’em.)

The fact of the matter is, most of us have absolutely no need for the sophisticated filters, plugins and tools that come with a full-house program like P-S. We just want to take the shine off Aunt Annie’s nose, the zit off Maryjane’s chin, maybe do a little bit of cropping, and resizing so that we can send images to Cousin Elmo in Henscratch, who still receives his email via smoke signal.

I use programs that I’ll mention briefly. You can get far more information about them at the sites. There are many similar apps, perhaps just as good, that I haven’t tried,  but I have extensive experience with these and can recommend them unconditionally.

The first is FastStone Image Viewer, free here. I use it for browsing photos instead of MS’s Picture and Fax viewer, because it’s nearly as fast and gives me  some fairly sophisticated editing capability without having to conjure up another application. (I love the magnifier.) For basic viewing, re-sizing, batch renaming, cropping and exposure adjustments you can’t beat it. It even does screen captures.

In fairness, I should also mention IrfanView, another excellent freeware editor similar to FastStone’s. I happen to find the latter a bit more intuitive, but Irfan’s baby - which he updates continually - is a good choice too.

Picasa 2, from Google, has the best straightening tool and exposure adjustment capability of any free program I’ve tried.  I use it a lot.  It’s not that they’re so much better in terms of performance, but the interface is so clean and intuitive that it’s a wonderful choice for those who want a simple application, capable of some fairly sophisticated operations, that’s easy to learn.  If it had cloning and painting tools, I’d use it almost exclusively. 

But none of the above will clone and paint, thus they’re no help with the shine and zit. For that, I use Serif Photo Plus, free here  (registration not required, but a good idea - see below.) Serif, based in England, give away their legacy programs - usually two or three versions behind their current commercial offerings, but very capable. In fact, there’s not a whole lot you can do with PhotoShop that you can’t do with PhotoPlus, and I find it easier to use from a beginner’s viewpoint. It will clone, paint, do layers, create animated GIFs…all that fancy stuff…and can even use many of the P-S plugins. If you’ve never used a cloning tool, you can’t imagine how easily photos can be improved.

I started off with PhotoPlus 6, the free download version. About two months later, they sent me an offer to purchase the CD version of PhotoPlus 8 for ten bucks - with free shipping. It was well-worth the money just to have the CD’s. The current version is 10, and I guess I’ll keep upgrading if they keep offering. List price for PhotoPlus 10 is $79.95 US.

Serif has a bunch of other programs, including web authoring and similar stuff for the same deal - free for the older versions, with reasonably-priced upgrades.