Photo Editing, Publishing, And Graphics Software Free For The Asking
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Steve Bass, over at PC World, mentioned in a newsletter some favorite software of his that’s available free for the asking. I’m not going to steal Steve’s material, but it made me think of some favorite freebies of my own, available from Serif Software.
Serif are British manufacturers of image and graphics software. As is beginning to be the case with a number of providers, they offer older versions of their current software for free, with upgrades to current offerings at reduced prices.
For example: Serif PhotoPlus, an excellent image manipulation application roughly similar to early versions of PhotoShop Elements, is available in v. 6 for free. Now v. 6 is a quite capable program, but for ten bucks they’ll upgrade you to v. 8, which is about all anyone needs for amateur photo tweaking. It includes cloning tools, layer support, and a number of other bells and whistles that IrfanView and FastStone don’t provide. (PhotoFiltre falls in between, with rudimentary cloning capability, but still doesn’t offer support for layers.)
I used v. 8 for quite some time before I was given a copy of PhotoShop Elements 5, and I don’t hesitate to recommend it to anyone. I keep a copy on a flash drive just in case I need a photo editing program when I’m away from home.
Other offerings from Serif include PagePlus, a desktop publishing application, WebPlus, for building websites without HTML experience, DrawPlus, a graphics program, and 3DPlus, for adding pizazz to your graphics and web pages. All are free.
These are commercial-grade programs, folks — just what you need for tweaking all those holiday pics — and the price is right. You get nag screens if you don’t register, but registration costs nothing and they send you offers for upgrades that are hard to resist — with opt-outs from mailings if you wish. Cruise over to FreeSerifSoftware.com and have a look.
4 Comments
Bradford Woltman
December 3rd, 2007
at 4:23pm
Hi, Bill. Could you compare it to Irfanview? I checked out the free verson, but it did not compare to Irfanviw + plugins. Please let me know what you think regarding the comparisons.
I have used Irfanview for many years and I do not believe Serif app out-performs the above, especially when you add the plug-ins. I am the Volunteer Coordinator for http://www.found-pets.org and ask my volunteers to give us a good photo of the lost pets. As a non-profit group we try to get the lost pet back to there owners, with no cost.
Bill, what do you think as to the comparison?
Brad
Bill Webb
December 3rd, 2007
at 9:04pm
IrfanView is an excellent application for viewing and tweaking images. I’ve used it extensively, although I prefer FastStone Image Viewer for most minor adjustments. (I like the interface better, is all.)
However, unless there have been some pretty sophisticated plugins added recently, IrfanView does not permit you to “morph” images: move parts of the image around, remove unwanted background, add other images to an original, clone paint, airbrush and so forth, all of which are part and parcel of Serif and other free “sophisticated” image manipulation programs such as The Gimp, Paint.NET, and the paid programs such as PhotoShop Elements 5, PhotoShop, etc. (I should also mention PhotoFiltre, which lacks layers but does incorporate some other things such as cloning.)
It is these capabilities that make Serif and other programs not so much better than IrfanView, but simply useful for different purposes while also incorporating the basics that make up 95% of most folks’ editing.
D Hale
May 5th, 2008
at 10:08pm
I an looking for free photo editing software. The main thing I need it to do is take a scanned negative and turn it into a positive photo. Which one do you recommend?
Bill
May 6th, 2008
at 3:38am
That isn’t an especially demanding chore, and either Irfanview or Faststone Image Viewer (or Serif or any other similar program) should be able to handle it. Check the help files if the menu isn’t obvious. I know on FastStone it’s on the one that pops out from the left side of the screen.