PHOTO EDITORS

[Bluestone]

PHOTO EDITORS

Photo editors are useful, and can be a lot of fun. Except where noted, all of these editors are free programs

MS Paint: This primarily is a drawing and painting tool. However, it can be used to physically resize images and digitally compress them to reduce their file sizes. It comes with most Windows operating systems.

MS Office Picture Manager: This editor is exceptionally easy to use for cropping and resizing photos. It is equally easy to use for brightness, contrast and color adjustments. The auto color correction function works reasonably well (with a little practice). It accepts most image formats. Unfortunately it only is available as part of MS Office, which I think sells for about $80 USD.

Picasa 3.8: This free program performs some basic editing functions, but its outstanding feature is the ease with which it can be used to create a wide variety if collages and photo montages. Definitely a fun program in this regard.

http://picasa.google.com/#utm_campaign= ... picasa%203

Photoscape: This is a well-regarded open-source editor with more features and functions than can be listed here. Among them are screen cap and collage making tools. In fact it is faster and easier to use than Picasa for making some but not all collage types. All of PhotoScape's functions are relatively straight forward and simple to work with. If you could only have one photo editor, this would be it.

http://www.photoscape.org/ps/main/index.php

GIMP: Known as the free Photo Shop, GIMP does just about everything the traditional Photo Shop does. The problem is it has a very steep learning curve. Not for the faint of heart or easily frustrated.

http://www.gimp.org/

Prepared by Algenon5 for FF Administration

(Edited to update information On Nov. 21, 2010)

[Algenon5]

See the follow-up posts "A FEW EDITING EFFECTS SAMPLES" and "I WAS WRONG" to view samples of some of the many effects these programs are capable of creating, and which do not require any special knowledge or previous experience on your part.

Al

[Algenon5]

A free PhotoScape upgrade has been released.
You can get it here:

http://www.photoscape.org/ps/main/download.php

Al

12/26/11