Best photo editing software

[Cougar]

I don't need the thousands of features in Photoshop, but I do need a few:

• Crop - the key to good photo composition!
  
• Resize/resample - Must be able to manipulate image size and resolution (dpi).
  
• Sharpen
  
• Saturation, contrast, tint, lightness...

That's really about all I absolutely need. First of all, are there any free downloads from the web with these features? Picasa is pretty cool, but as far as I know, it does not have resize/resample, which I think is crucial.

If you think it's worth spending a little cash on such a program, what's your suggestion?

[SeanF]

Check out GIMP. It's freeware.

I'm not entirely sure if it can do everything you need, but it's pretty powerful software.

[a1call]

It can do everything that he mentioned and much more. But I find the default multiwindow setup annoying. IMHO the best photo editing software is any paintshop-pro version before it was bought by Adobe. The version 5 is probably the most straightforward and sufficient version. If you are going to gobwith Gimp, consider setting up ubuntu. You could boot with the installation CD or install the whole operating system on a 4GB USB stick and carry the brain of your whole computer at your pocket. Ubuntu is free and I believe has GIMP installed by default. There are tons of other such softeware that you can install from the distribution centers as well all free.

[Andrew D]

I run GIMP on windows just fine, and would recommend it, as far as freeware goes.

[Cougar]

Thanks, Sean.

It can do everything that he mentioned and much more.

Yeah, I see at III.13.4.6 of the manual it has transform tools --> scale. Every student of general relativity must have a scale modifier.

I'll check it out. I may find out I want to drop a few bucks for a little nicer model, but... maybe not.

You could boot with the installation CD or install the whole operating system on a 4GB USB stick and carry the brain of your whole computer at your pocket.

Are you sure you're not just quoting out of Asimov's The Foundation Trilogy?

[PetersCreek]

IMHO the best photo editing software is any paintshop-pro version before it was bought by Adobe.

It was Corel that bought out JASC and I agree they pretty much ruined PSP. I was a user from it's shareware days but after Corel's first release...well, I don't regret moving to Photoshop.

I've heard little but good things about GIMP, though.

[John Jaksich]

GIMP--is very versatile but it has many features--IMO--it can be somewhat non-user-friendly---

[GeorgeLeRoyTirebiter]

I'm not a fan of GIMP, but I would also recommend it in this case. It isn't even in the same league as also-rans like Paint Shop Pro and PhotoPaint, but it is the best free image editor, and it can do what you need. There's even a Windows installer available in case you're not the kind of person that likes to compile all of your software.

[Frog march]

Paint.net is very user friendly(and free)

http://www.getpaint.net/

[pantaz]

• Crop - the key to good photo composition!
  
• Resize/resample - Must be able to manipulate image size and resolution (dpi).
  
• Sharpen
  
• Saturation, contrast, tint, lightness...

Those are generally the only things I do to my photos, and IrfanView (Windows) is the simplest, most straightforward way to do them. (Freeware, "for non-commercial use".)
It can do much more, but the basics are accomplished with elegant simplicity. Plus, most features have associated keyboard shortcuts, AND it supports a large set of command line options, AND it has a "batch" feature.

http://www.irfanview.com/

[slang]

Those are generally the only things I do to my photos, and IrfanView (Windows) is the simplest, most straightforward way to do them. (Freeware, "for non-commercial use".)
It can do much more, but the basics are accomplished with elegant simplicity. Plus, most features have associated keyboard shortcuts, AND it supports a large set of command line options, AND it has a "batch" feature.

http://www.irfanview.com/

Cool. Exactly what I was going to recommend, at least for quick work. Seconded! I haven't tried GIMP in a while, but IrfanView is very easy to use. Started out as just another Image viewer program, but loads of options added on later. It's my default viewer for many multimedia types, and it's ranked high on my list of favorite free Windows software.

ETA: and when in desperate need, but unable to install software: there are many websites that allow online photo editing, and services like photobucket.com offer it as well.

[Cougar]

Those are generally the only things I do to my photos, and IrfanView (Windows) is the simplest, most straightforward way to do them.

Ach. I should have mentioned. I just picked up an iMac running snow leopard.

[Delvo]

• Crop - the key to good photo composition!
• Resize/resample - Must be able to manipulate image size and resolution (dpi).

You can do these with "Paint", which comes free with Windows. It's in the Start menu's Accessories folder. There's also usually another called "Imaging" which also has some simple editing functions. So if you have Windows, you can already do these particular image edits.

• Sharpen
• Saturation, contrast, tint, lightness...

That second line reminds me of another thing you might already have and not know it: "Picture Manager", which comes with some versions of Microsoft Office. It's not listed as one of the main programs but buried in the folder called "Microsoft Office Tools". It can crop more easily than Paint, and resize with better-looking results than Paint, and it also has brightness, contrast, saturation, and a few other controls, and if you select more than one file at a time, you can apply the same edits to all of them at once. The reason you can select more than one picture at a time at all seems to be that it originated as an image viewing & organizing program rather than an editor, so its interface is a like a Windows window, showing the directory structure in a column to the left, with thumbnails of all of the images in the chosen folder in the middle of the screen (and you can change the size of the thumbnails). You can also rename whole groups of files at once with it. But the feature that's made it so awesome for me is one image editing ability that none of my other programs have: something called "Enhance color" which is essentially a white-balance corrector and film color decay undoer. I've used it to rescue a bunch of old pictures I had on old film negatives that were dull/dark and too purple. Just select it, point the cursor at a point in the picture that "should be white" (which, perhaps unexpectedly, most pictures do have have in them somewhere), and it identifies the difference between the actual color there and white and applies the reverse to the whole image. The result is the immediate perfect restoration of a bad image's true colors, which would have been difficult or impossible to match with ages of work using other tools.

But I don't think is has a sharpen/blur option, and you probably can't get it separate from getting Office.

For blur/sharpen tools, basic drawing, partial copying & pasting, most resizing, and miscellaneous tools & effects, I'm used to Arcsoft Photo Studio 2.0, which came with a Fuji digital camera I used at a job I had from 2000 to 2002. (The camera had a 3.5" floppy drive built in!) Arcsoft is still around, and now they're up to version 6 in that series, and charging $80 for it. I've never tried version 6. Version 2 was my first image editor that went beyond Microsoft Paint, and it's still by far what I'm used to. I made a copy of the installer CD and I still have it, just so I can install it on any new computer I get since then instead of having to find a replacement for it. I could send a copy to you if you want it; I doubt Arcsoft would care about copying anymore. It had both Windows and Mac versions on the same disk, but the Mac OS it was intended for was 9, so I don't know what would happen with any of the X line.

I also have GIMP, but only use it for a couple of things: things PhotoStudio can't do. It's not that I don't like it or have any problems with it, but it's just not what I'm used to. But it's the only only program I have that can do animated GIFs (and transparent GIFs I think), and it has something that's like the brightness & contrast functions you mentioned but much better than any simple brightness & contrast. It shows you a line graph showing which input brightness levels correspond to which output brightness levels. It starts out as a straight line from the lower left to the upper right. With plain brightness & contrast adjustment, all you do is the equivalent of moving the ends of that line straight up, down, right, or left along the outer edges of the input-output graph. But with this graph on the screen, you can actually click on it anywhere along the way through the middle and drag the line into whatever arc you want, and even click and drag a few more points to manipulate the curve's shape through several differently-sloped stages on the way from darkest to brightest. The level of control this gives you over how bright/dark different parts of the image will be based on how bright/dark they were to start with is much greater, and GIMP is the only free program I know of that can do it.

[GeorgeLeRoyTirebiter]

Ach. I should have mentioned. I just picked up an iMac running snow leopard.

Well, someone has also created GIMP installers for OS X.


I feel I should probably explain why I dislike GIMP, yet still recommend it. I use it not just for basic image editing (which it does fairly well), but also to create textures for games and CGI, either working from scratch or from heavily edited reference photos. The problem is that GIMP lacks some useful features, most of which are not just found in Photoshop, but were also in software like Corel PhotoPaint over a decade ago. Things like:

–Non-destructive editing via adjustment layers. This is the most requested new feature, yet there's been little progress made to implement it. The developers are instead waiting until a new graphics library (GEGL) is fully incorporated into GIMP, currently scheduled to be completed sometime during the first quarter of never.

–Combined transformation tools. Each transformation (rotation, scaling, etc.) in GIMP is a separate operation, requiring that the image be resampled and filtered every time. Other image editors allow transformations to be combined, resulting in sharper images after complex transformations.

–Brush rotation. There's no way to arbitrarily rotate a brush, a severe limitation when painting with "grunge" brushes (this has been fixed in the latest development release, but isn't yet in a stable version).

–Optional non-premultiplied transparency. When loading or saving an image with an alpha channel, GIMP always multiplies the color of each pixel with the transparency value. This can cause problems with textures for games that don't assume premultiplied alpha.

–Support for advanced OpenType font features. The absence of this is a complaint I have about quite a bit of non-Adobe software. At least GIMP uses kerning and ligatures by default, which is more than I can say for Microsoft Word.

None of these missing features (or the innumerable minor annoyances I didn't list) should get in your way if you're just doing darkroom-type photo editing, and that's where GIMP is at its most powerful.