Free Photo Editing Tools

Adobe Photoshop is THE big daddy of photo editing. Photoshop is used for any serious post processing by photographers ranging from amateurs to professional. If Photoshop didn’t cost an arm and a leg, everybody would be using it. Of course, some knowledge is also required to fully utilise the features available in Photoshop.

If Photoshop is out of your reach, there are a bunch of photo editing software available which are not only FREE but also easy to use. Top four on my personal favorites list are:

Gimp - Started as an alternative to Photoshop for Linux users, it has been available on Windows for some time now. It is the closest to Photoshop that we can get for FREE. Gimp is also available in many different languages.

Paint.Net - Developed as a project for undergraduate college senior design project, it is still being maintained by some of the Alumni who originally worked on it. Some features includes layers, blurring, gradients, bezier curves, unlimited undos and more!

Picasa - Free Photo Organizer from Google with simple to use features like crop and straighten. It also has other nifty features to share your images on Picasa Web Album

FastStone Image Viewer - Fast, light and extremely easy to use. I love the crop function which even shows guidelines for the Rule of Thirds. FastStone Image Viewer does not lose to any of the above if you need quick and easy image editing.

Do you have any other tools that you would like to share? Please drop us a comment about your favorite tool!