Recommend a Photo Editing software?

What do you recommend for a good (free) Photo Editing software?

In the past, I've used PhotoShop and Picassa, but I'm wondering if there's anything better out there?

My primary purpose is to tweak up photos I've taken for posting on Facebook, an online dating site, and shave-den pics to post here.

I know better than to just upload raw photos ... I want to adjust contrast, brightness, and especially cropping.

I'm not looking for anything too intense. If it has Auto-correct functions, that would be great.

Last night, I asked a friend who is into Visual Arts and he recommended Gimp ... I downloaded it and found it far too confusing for me, it has dozens of advanced features I don't understand and will never use. Plus, it set off my Norton360 security alarms during install, and two of the add-ons had to go into quarantine.

What are you guys using that is:

*Free (not a trial version that will expire in 30 days)
*User Friendly and Intuitive to operate.
*Not overly encumbered by advanced features that only a professional would need.

I'm running on a Windows 8.1 system. I'm looking for a program to run on the desktop, not an App.

Thanks!

Been a photoshop user since it was introduced. Stopped at the last "boxed" edition (CS6) and will stay there unless Adobe gets off of this "rent by the year" debacle with their products.

Free is always going to be crippled/short shifted when compared to something like PS.

Gimp is acceptable but little more than what you get when you sing up for the free imaging hosting with companies like photo bucket (who let you edit your pics on their site).

Subscribe to GOTD (give away of the day). Free photo editing software pops up on there occasionally. It is retail box stuff that is offered for free to get people interested in their products then send them upgrade offers when a new release is brought out.

For discounted stuff you can sign up for BitsDuJour. Sometimes the software is free sometimes deep discounted (50-75% off).

Both of these are promotional mailing lists that vendors use to get interest in their products.

You won't find photoshop on these but they do get some decent photo editing software and lower than street price.

dpm802 said:

I know better than to just upload raw photos ... I want to adjust contrast, brightness, and especially cropping.

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PhotoScape will do the trick, is very simple and free.

You can try Fotor, a free online program.

Lightroom. still a stand alone and part of the adobe cloud crap. I have the stand alone.

here is a before and after. all I did was correct the wb, sharpened a bit and tossed on an HDR mask

I would be fishing around for an old disk of PhotoShop Elements--like the ones that used to ship with Canon camera.

I also run PhotoShop CS6. I'm a teacher and I was able to score the software at a very agreeable price. That said, most of my editing is done with a combination of CS6 and OnOne's Perfect Photo Suite 9.

Photo Suite 9 works standalone or as an add-on to the major photo editing products. It's very easy to use and the results are great. It will set you back $150. The yearly upgrades have been half that price.

Gimp is a great piece of free software. There are lots of free scripts that make it easy to get a lot out of Gimp with minimal hassle. If you want free and lots of flexibility Gimp plus installed scripts works pretty well.

http://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-find-and-use-scripts-in-gimp/ - how to article

http://registry.gimp.org/ - download scripts from here

IrfanView is primarily a viewing tool but does most of what you are looking for. It is especially useful for cropping photos and compressing the image size, e.g. reducing a ~2 MB photo down to ~100 K with an acceptable quality for online posting.

If you are on an Ipad for any of your photos AVIARY is very good, Also to stack pictures Helicon has a 30-day trial.

Bob L. said:

I also run PhotoShop CS6. I'm a teacher and I was able to score the software at a very agreeable price. That said, most of my editing is done with a combination of CS6 and OnOne's Perfect Photo Suite 9.

Photo Suite 9 works standalone or as an add-on to the major photo editing products. It's very easy to use and the results are great. It will set you back $150. The yearly upgrades have been half that price.

Gimp is a great piece of free software. There are lots of free scripts that make it easy to get a lot out of Gimp with minimal hassle. If you want free and lots of flexibility Gimp plus installed scripts works pretty well.

http://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-find-and-use-scripts-in-gimp/ - how to article

http://registry.gimp.org/ - download scripts from here

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My son who is a graphic artist had some nice things to say about Gimp. He said some of the older versions were harder to learn but the latest if quite good. Also, in addition to the online help there are some good videos on youtube.

dpm, my suggestion is to surrender and get photoshop, at least elements.
you'll be using it eventually, so go ahead and start the learning curve.
for mission critical stuff like online dating sites, you should not take a risk.
just my 2c.

Lightzone is a open source version of Lightroom. It works very well.

The newest versions of GIMP offer tons of functionality similar to Photoshop.

Both are free.

I just stumbled across this tonight and remembered you were looking for a free editing package. I think it has potential.

http://www.faststone.org/

. . .

What are you guys using that is:

*Free (not a trial version that will expire in 30 days) [YES]
*User Friendly and Intuitive to operate. [YES]
*Not overly encumbered by advanced features that only a professional would need. [YES]

. . .

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Works in Windows 8 too.

The best deal is if you can find someone you know who is a teacher, or in school. The whole Creative Cloud suite is $19.99/mo. I had my brother sign up for an account with his school email address. I pay with my credit card.

You can also get access to just Photoshop and Lightroom in the Photography bundle for just $9.99/mo. Really, in the end, not too shabby. You will find the most tutorials on the web for those programs as well.

I bet if you looked on eBay, you could find standalone versions of Photoshop CS6 for a decent price too. Photohop elements would probably be something to look at. It looks like you can pick it up for $100.

Thats just my 2 cents from a person who has been using Photoshop since version 4.0 or 5.0 (and thats NOT the CS versions)

I've been using photoshop since PS 7, like others I recommend getting Photoshop elements or at least an older version of photoshop. They really dont change much between each version.
The gimp is good too and if I recall, can use photoshop filters.

I dont know if its still the case, but you used to get a free copy of Photoshop Elements when you bought a graphics tablet.

For tweaking photos for uploading, I would think think Lightroom is best. Photoshop does many things to alter photos but to adjust them, Lightroom is king. If you can get a free copy from somewhere, its great.
An alternative that is always free is Picasa. Its fine for adjustments and also a great photo manager.

+1 for Gimp. It's almost a feature-packed as Photoshop and is open source.

As a reformed graphic designer, I have been a Photoshop user since version 3 (oooh...layers!) and I switched to exclusively using Gimp around CS2 or so.

For run-of-the-mill toning, I find Picasa does 95% of what I need, though.

Nice shots Mark.
As for the software, Perfect Photo Suite 9
is pretty good. It does layers and has some really nice masking and cutout tool. I think maybe easier to get good results from than PS CS6.
Plus they have the best photo resize module out there.
I seem to remember the suite was around 200.00, definitely cheaper than PS or lightroom.

phrogpilot73 said:

Lightzone is a open source version of Lightroom. It works very well.

The newest versions of GIMP offer tons of functionality similar to Photoshop.

Both are free.

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Good recommendations I believe.

I still think irfanview is good for basic photo management, including batch file renaming, cropping individual photos, and basic contrast/white balance tweaks to brighten up a dark photo, which seemed to be the main use cases of the original poster.

I recently downloaded LightZone based on your recommendation here and have used it for only five minutes so I cannot give any real review, but it appears to do a better job with contrast/white balance corrections, and has a lot more capabilities. The learning curve will be higher than irfanview, but it looks reasonable given the funcitionality. My initial 5 minute impression of it was quite good.

I have not tried gimp in 10 years or so. Way back then I really wanted to like it, but it brought up many detached windows and it assumed I had an idea of the terminology and what I wanted to do. I should try gimp again as it certainly must have evolved, but after trying it a couple of times way back then I gave up on it, as I had only wanted to do some edits on one photo, not spend days learning how to use different aspects of the program.

Has anyone used aperture?