10 Adobe Photoshop Free Alternatives
I am sure that we can all agree that there is really no absolute alternative to Adobe Photoshop, but sometimes we just don’t need a million tools to simply edit a picture for a blog post. Agreed that Adobe Photoshop can edit a picture at the pixel-level, but do we really need that for editing pictures for blogging purposes? Sometimes, simple and one click edit is better, and let’s spend more time on the content than the aesthetics of a Blog.
Keeping all this in mind, Pilotology.com brings you the Top 10 Picture Editing tools, and they are all Freeware and / or Open Source!
Windows Live Photo Gallery
With Windows Live Photo Gallery, it’s a snap to get your photos and videos from your camera to your PC. Find your favorite photos and share them with friends and family. Make your great photos look even better, and create impressive panoramic photos too.
Editing features include adjusting exposure, color, or detail by hand, or use auto adjust. You can even create mesmerizing panoramas—Photo Gallery stitches several photos together in just one click. Browsing feature by date, caption and tagging people are some of the cool feature you would like to check out.
IrfanView
IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 , 2008, Vista, Windows 7. Simple for the newbie, but powerful for the professional. Many supported file formats, Multi language support, Thumbnail/preview option, Paint option – to draw lines, circles, arrows, straighten image etc., Toolbar skins option, Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD) and lot more features.
Paint.NET
Paint.NET, originally intended to be an alternative to Microsoft Paint, but soon with its highlighting features it ruled and became one of the best tool to crop images, rotate, adjust colors, resize, make collages and many more. All feature and user interface element are designed to be immediately intuitive and quickly learnable without assistance. You’d love it’s special effects that offers everything from blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, distortion, noise, and embossing. Also included is a unique 3D Rotate/Zoom effect that makes it very easy to add perspective and tilting.
Picasa
Picasa is free photo editing software by Google that makes your pictures look great, make sharing pictures with family and friends a breeze, and editing a piece of cake. Together, Picasa & Picasa Web Albums make it easy for you to organize and edit your digital photos, then create online albums to share with friends, family & the world. Some of the exciting features include, edit to perfection, get organized, be creative, add places, and simple sharing. The feature I love the most is that the Web Album allows you to post your photos online.
FastStone Image Viewer
FastStone Image Viewer is a fast, stable, user-friendly image converter, editor and browser. It does carry amazing array of features, which includes image viewing, comparison, cropping, managing, red-eye removal, renaming, add texts, watermarks, emailing, border effects, color adjustments and many more.
Other features include a high quality magnifier and a musical slideshow with 150+ transitional effects, as well as lossless JPEG transitions, drop shadow effects, image annotation, scanner support, histogram and much more.
Apple iPhoto
iPhoto makes managing your photos as easy as taking them. It helps you organize your photos so you can find them fast, edit them so they look their best, and share them with your friends and family. Further iPhoto gives you more ways to keep track of your photos by organizing them according to who’s in your pictures, where you took them, and when you took them. Places to go, event to remember and experiment with effects are some of the cool features you must have a look.
iPhoto introduces Faces: a new feature that automatically detects and even recognizes faces in your photos. iPhoto uses face detection to identify faces of people in your photos and face recognition to match faces that look like the same person.
XnView
XnView is a fast multi-format graphics browser, viewer, and converter. It can read more than 400 file formats, e.g. GIF, BMP, JPEG, PNG, TARGA, multipage TIFF, camera RAW, JPEG 2000, MPEG, AVI, Quicktime. EXIF & IPTC metadata are also supported. The image viewer has an Explorer-like browser that allows quick and simple browsing of directory contents. XnView supports red eye correction, crops and transforms JPEG images losslessly, generates HTML pages and contact sheets, and provides batch conversion and batch renaming. Slide shows with transitions effects, screen capturing, WIA & TWAIN support (scanner & digital cameras), image comparison, file operations.
PicaJet Photo Organizer
PicaJet Photo Organizer automatically manages 1000’s of digital photos in seconds. Photo indexing is faster than in other competitive products. PicaJet allows you to selectively index folders or files at any time, review and edit photos as desired, without pigeonholing you into an awkward interface structure. You can create highly complex category structures or simple ones. It is up to you and depends entirely on your needs and not on any program limits.
GIMP
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a nice distributed piece of software suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring. It is a powerful piece of software with capabilities not found in any other free software product. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert-quality photo-retouching program, an online batch-processing system, a mass production image renderer, or an image-format converter. GIMP is modular, expandable, and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything.
Abobe Photoshop Elements
Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 software combines power and simplicity so you can make your photos look extraordinary, share your life stories in unique print creations and web experiences, and easily manage and protect all your photos and video clips. Exciting features of this software would include, Recompose photos to any size — without distortion, Easily manage everything from one convenient place, Quickly find your best photos, and many more.
