Best Photo Editing Software (Free): Top 10 Image Editors for your Digital World

Best Photo Editing Software (Free)

If you would like to make your digital photos look their very best, but you don’t wish to spend hundreds of dollars for highly-priced image editing software like Adobe Photoshop, you’re in luck. There’s an abundance of totally free products available. The following article will give you my list of both installed (on your pc) and online software that will enable you to do your photo editing and photo enhancements without costing you a penny.

 

GIMP (Win/OS X/Linux)

 

GIMP (the GNU Image Manipulation Program) first appeared way back in 1996, and has been regularly updated ever since. The package is the most powerful image/photo editor you’ll find anywhere, and it’s completely free. GIMP packs as many features as Photoshop itself. It also has cross platform support for Windows, OS X, and Linux systems.

GIMP has image correction utilities that make photo manipulation and retouching easy. There’s full layer support and lots of ways to extend the program. There are tools to correct colours, enhance contrast and brightness, sharpen or blur an image, fix perspective problems, remove red-eye; add special lighting effects, turn a photo into an oil painting, create an animation, and much more.

The bad news: All this power does mean GIMP takes a while to learn.

The good news: If you’ve any previous image editing experience then you’ll be doing useful work with GIMP within minutes.

Paint.net (Windows)

 

Paint.NET has nothing like the power of GIMP, but makes up for it in simplicity. It has all the image editing basics such as resize and rotate with a good range of selection and paint tools, plus some excellent special effects. Paint.net has support for layers and can be extended with plugins.

The best thing about Paint.NET is its clear, simple and straightforward interface which means it can be used by a complete graphics novice with very little effort.

Paint.net is ideal for the vast majority of people looking to touch up a photo before they post it to the web, resize or crop an image, or do basic image editing, and it’s completely free. If you just need to open a tool to do some basic work and want a fast, flexible, and free utility to do it, Paint.NET is the way to go.

PhoXo

 

PhoXo is a tiny, fast, easy to use, powerful, free, image and photo editor. Its been around for almost 10 years now and grown into a very useful editor with something for everyone. Once again, not a powerful as GIMP, but its features include layers, undo, over 50 special effects, batch processing, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools for selecting, crop, painting, retouching, measuring and navigation. You can easily add text effects to image, such as shadow text, ripple text, gradient colour etc.

PhoXo web site provides a large number of resources, including step by step tutorials, thousands of free clip-art, frames, patterns, textures and shapes.

Pixlr Editor (Web)

 

Pixlr Editor from AutoDesk is actually part of a suite of Pixlr apps, Mobile App Pixlr Express, and photo filter and tweaking app, Pixlr-O-Matic.

Pixlr Editor is a richly featured web app that offers a healthy dose of features for editing photos and images. It packs adjustments, layers, filters and effects, basic features like rotation, resizing, cropping and editing, area selection, and so on. It’s not as feature-packed or as streamlined as a lot of other tools, but the fact that it’s free and runs in your browser alone makes it worth your attention.

Pixlr Express makes editing and correcting your photos on the go easy. It does just about everything the average user needs. Plus, the fact that it’s a web app means it runs in any browser, on any OS.

Best Photo Editing Software Runners-up

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is the market leader when it comes to photo retouching, image editing, or even creating new images from scratch. However, for most people’s uses, it may just be too many features to wade through, too much money to spend, or too complicated to use.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (Windows/OS X)

Adobe Lightroom is designed specifically for photographers, and has the broad variety of tools and features they need to get their photos edited, retouched, updated, and corrected. Lightroom is part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite. The full version is $149.

Corel PaintShop Pro

Corel PaintShop Pro has gone through many incarnations since its early days. I must admit, I’m still using the shareware version as a replacement for MS Paint. Now owned by Corel, it’s a powerful and relatively inexpensive program available in Standard and Ultimate editions with many features and utilities bundled.

Picasa

Picasa is a Google-owned photo management and editing package you can download free of charge from Google. In addition to image management and basic editing, Picasa allows you to share your images via a number of Google-owned internet services and social networking platforms such as Google+. Overall, while the organisation and photo management tools of Picasa are pretty good, the editing tools are a little basic. Unlike GIMP, Picasa is perfect for absolute beginners, more advanced users will find Picasa a bit simplistic and limited.

Pixelmator (OS X)

Pixelmator is a richly featured image editor for OS X. It’ll set you back $30, but it often appears in bundles and app packs along with other useful utilities, so it can be had at a bargain. You can have Pixelmator free for 30 days if you want to give it a try.

Serif PhotoPlus SE

For a long time, Serif gave away dated versions of their software to entice users to purchase the current version. They now offer a free limited version of the photo-editing software, Serif PhotoPlus SE, which features an export optimizer, editable text, layer effects, layer masks, a red-eye removal tool, special effects, versatile brushes, and photo enhancement tools. You can of course upgraded to the full version of PhotoPlus, with many more features, for a modest price.

Best Photo Editing Software Conclusion

Well that’s my selection of the best photo editing software I think is available. It covers everyone from the general user to expert graphics artist and operating system requirements such as Windows, OS X, Linux and Web app. Of course if creating your own images is not for you, then you can always go to one of the many royalty free stock photo sites such as Shutterstock and use one of their excellent, professionally produced images.

For those of you who are more artistic, have you tried a little screen capture? With the right software, such as TechSmith Snagit followed by a little trick photography and special effects you can create custom images for demos, feedback, reviews, and more.

Finally, if you have any thoughts or suggestions relating to the best photo editing software, don’t forget to let me have them in the comment box below. Thanks for dropping by.