Free photo editing programs and software

If you need to edit and enhance your photographs there are many online and downloadable editing software programs that you can use and for free. We review the best.

Many of us will remember the days before digital photography, when film ruled and any kind of editing involved painstaking hours in the darkroom, expensive equipment and tubs of smelly and dangerous chemicals. Although some may be nostalgic for the red glow of the photographic darkroom light the fact is that digital photography has given more people the freedom to produce photographs cheaply and easily. According  to some reports a staggering 24 million photographs are taken every single second around the world! Almost every cell phone has a camera built-in.

Why we need to edit our photos

But what do we do with these photos? It seems that many of them are destined for the Internet, with almost 1,000 per second being uploaded to Facebook and many more to other social media networks. More are emailed to our friends and family and others are used in our blogs and websites.

Digital cameras are now cheap and produce excellent results but sometimes they produced files that are way too large to upload to the Internet. Even my own dinosaur 8 mega-pixel Lumix produces images that weigh in at a massive 4Mb each, with dimensions of 3072 x 2304 pixels. This is great if we need to produce physical prints of our photos but how many of us do that nowadays? Mostly we want to post these images onto the Internet and to do that we need to edit them down to a reasonable dimension and file size.

Not being the world’s greatest photographers we may also need to crop the images to improve the framing, or change the color balance to compensate for bad lighting or poor settings. Most cameras are very good at doing the thinking for us but the automatic processes they offer don’t necessarily produce the best photos.

So, assuming that most of us need to edit our snaps to produce useable results we can post into the ether we will need some editing software. You can, of course, pay a fortune for the top-of-the range, professional editing software such as Photoshop or Fireworks but these programs have an over-abundance of esoteric features that most of use will never use.

Luckily, for PC users there are many free image editing programs available which will do the tasks we require, namely, crop, resize, reduce file size and adjust colour balance. For those with Macs the picture is less rosy (no pun intended) but free editors are available.

Here is a list of the best free photo editing software available for you to test out.

1) GIMP

GIMP is touted as “The free alternative to Photoshop” and contains a huge amount of features (possibly too many for our use) but it has been around for a long time, is stable and is available for Macs too (if you are running OSX). If you are feeling adventurous and want a full-featured free program this may be the one for you.

2) MICROSOFT PAINT

This has been standard issue with the Microsoft operating system for years and is still available in Windows 7. For many of us this will be perfectly adequate and can crop, rotate, resize and export as gif, jpg, bmp and png. The one thing missing from this software is automatic color correction.

3) PAINT.NET

Was created as a more sophisticated replacement to Microsoft Paint and adds many features to the basic package including :

• Red-Eye removal
• Curves – allows you to adjust the depth of every shade in a photo
• Levels – allows you to modify the color range of an image
• Auto Levels
• Brightness & Contrast
• Hue & Saturation
• Cloning Tool – allows you to remove slight imperfections in a photo

You can also add creative, special effects to your photos such as line drawing, sepia effects and color inversion.

4) PICASSA

A free Google product which ties in with their image hosting and sharing application. It is easy to use and provides many basic functions including:  Crop, Straighten, Redeye, Auto Contrast, Auto Color, and Fill Light. The “I’m Feeling Lucky” option (echoing the search engine feature), optimizes the color and contrast levels and deepens bright and dark colors with just one click.

5) GRAPHIC CONVERT

And finally, one more for the Mac user. Graphic  Convertor is shareware, but you can download and use the software for free, without a time limitation. The only thing missing from the free version is the ability to batch process files.

The beauty of all these programs is that they are absolutely free to download and use so you can take your time, test each one of them out and can chose the one which best suits your needs.

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