You don’t need to shell out hundreds of dollars for professional image editing software in order to get high quality results from your post production and retouching. In this saving guides will revels the very best low cost software options and a whole host of programs that can be downloaded from the Internet and used for free! Now you can start thinking what you could spend the extra cash on..
Everyone loves a freebie, don’t they? It’s hard to imagine why someone would spend days hunched in front of a workstation writing complex computer code only to give away the results for nothing, but that’s the fact of the matter. The industry has a long history of sticking software in the public domain. This freeware is typically offered for private rather than corporate usage and can be found by simply typing “free photo editing software” into Google and watch as the options suddenly look endless. Possibly the most well known to date is GIMP which has long been hailed as the ‘alternative Photoshop’. It packs a lot of power in terms of tools and features and can certainly rival Photoshop in this respect, but it’s also got a reputation as being rather difficult to grasp. A good choice then for those who like the challenge of poking around software and working things out; if you’ve got the patience, GIMP does have a lot to offer.
More intuitive is the Google’s own image editing software, Picasa. It started out as more of an image management tool but quickly grew to include many popular retouching tools like cropping, straightening, red-eye removal as well as contrast, colour and fill light, but image editing is limited to global corrections -you can’t apply edits to specific areas or work at the pixel level. Where it really comes into its own though is tagging and sharing images online, plus you get 1GB of free online storage should you need it. If your priority is getting your shots online for all to see with a bit of spit and polish, Picasa’s a real good choice. If you’re more into the detailed retouching side of things, you’ll need to look elsewhere.
Sitting somewhere between GIMP and Picasa in feature terms is Paint.net. It boasts pixel editing, layers, history, actions and a more straightforward interface than GIMP; indeed the interface is not entirely dissimilar to Photoshop. You’ve also got all the most important features like curves, levels, contrast, brightness and hue/saturation as well as cloning and red-eye removal tools and effects filters. Sure it lacks some of the more advanced features that GIMP can offer but you’ll be up and running a darn sight quicker. The only real downer is for Mac user as it’s currently PC only.
