Haven’t you had an instance viewing your blurred picture taken from an old mobile phone? Haven’t you ever felt like editing that picture increasing the brightness or reducing the contrast at least once? Though there are many professional image editing applications available in the market many-a-times its price tag is found to be way too steep for a simple image editing.
But there are various free tools that provide you with the basic image manipulation features along with some unique functionality which makes it more suitable for certain kind of applications. So, here I will provide you with an exclusive list of five ‘free’ photo editing software tools.
PhotoScape:
PhotoScape is an exclusive beginner’s toolkit for photo editing. The first thing that you will notice in it is its user friendly interface. It provides a complete feature set needed for editing, printing, cropping, resizing, renaming your photo and comes with a variety of filters such as antique photo, lightning, film effects, curves, bloom, backlight etc. Even you can use PhotoScape to add comic effects to your photo. All that you need to know is to navigate through your computer to get the photos to edit. It has an inbuilt slideshow viewer. I can’t avoid mentioning about the useful help content available with PhotoScape.
GIMP:
GIMP is the short form for GNU Image Manipulation Program and as the name says its more GNU like. It’s freely available software which can pretty much do anything that a professional photo editor application such as Photoshop can do. It offers an impressive set of advanced image manipulation tools such as foreground extraction, path tool etc. The path tool (Bezier selection) helps you to make polygonal selections to select almost any feature in the image exactly using its selection curve. You can accurately change hair/skin/eye color of your picture with this wonderful software. A wide variety of features are provided with GIMP’s animation tool box. The advanced tool set of latest GIMP version is shown below. Though the ‘GNU-like’ make GIMP a bit tedious as you would feel like starting with command lines. But if you are serious editing your image, then GIMP is a better choice to go with.
Paint.NET:
Paint.NET is a photo editing program available for Microsoft Windows platform that comes with a simple interface. Released in 2004, Paint.NET can be considered as a simple replacement for the Microsoft Paint that comes freely with Windows. This is a wonderful tool for designers and those who are familiar using Photoshop would love this software. The ruler and grid that comes with Paint.net says exactly where your drawing pixel is and hence most welcomed for precise drawing features. It supports layered drawing and the tabbed document feature makes it easy to manage multiple images.
Inkscape:
Inkscape is a very popular open source image editor that runs on Windows and Mac OS. With a few clicks anyone can get Inkscape downloaded and installed in your system.
One of the most important features of Inkscape is that it is a free vector graphics editor and that’s what makes it different from Photoshop which is a bit map editor. Instead of using pixel bits Vector graphics uses curves and lines to draw. The result is smooth imaging and editing.
You can create and manipulate object of any shape with this tool. It imports several formats like JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF etc. When it comes to exporting it only supports PNG as well as multiple vector based formats. The best way to obtain a BMP out of Inkscape is to export that with other freeware like GIMP.
The user interface might be a little intimidating at first but it actually is very simple and easy to use. Inkscape is a best way to create logos, banner and whatever media had to be scaled or modified in vector mode. Download Inkscape by following the link.
Photobie:
Yet another powerful ‘free’ graphics tool. With a few steps Photobie can provide you with a wonderful gif animation. It provides all basic editing techniques along with some unique features such as digital scrapbooking. The wide range of Photobie feature list includes all photo images editing functionality such as smudging, blurring, sharpening etc, all essential painting tools, layer supporting, filters for special effects, supports template design, and a stylish interface flash jukebox. The jukebox feature is especially designed for kids that help them download music, games, and other flash files from web and to make their own playlists.
PhotoPlus:
PhotoPlus is software from Serif designed to make a perfect photo editing tool. Even though its tool kit is not as elaborate when compared to a mainstream photo editor, it can still be considered as a good choice. Web designers would really appreciate this software as it gets the job done fairly easy. A number of animation features, and filters are available with PhotoPlus. PhotoPlus X3 comes with some advanced features such as color balancing, channel mixing etc.
Conclusion:
There are many other well known free photo editors including PhotoFiltre, ImageForge, Picasa etc that helps you save some money yet meeting all your image manipulation needs. Even if I basically don’t consider Picasa as a photo editor, it still provides some essential basic photo editing features. The best way to figure out which software suits you is to watch the tutorials freely available online and to decide yourself.
Have fun editing your picture!
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