Photo editing software - fully functional, and free
Posted 9 May 2007 at 10:08AM by Simon Dickson in Website development
These days, whether you're producing documents or building a website, you're invariably going to be working with images and photos. For imaging professionals, there is still no substitute for Adobe's Photoshop; but you're looking at about £500 a copy. For the rest of us, there's a couple of very good free alternatives.
Paint.NET began life in 2004 as a college project mentored by Microsoft, intended to replace the primitive Windows Paint tool (which a startling number of people still use today). Now it's reached version 3, and it's a fully-fledged photo and image editor. For the vast majority of tasks, it has everything you'll need - and includes some innovative ideas to make things easier, too. The only catch is that you'll need to download Microsoft's hefty .NET Framework, if you don't have it already.
You'll also find very basic editing functionality in some of the 'photo library' tools out there, like Google's Picasa or the very impressive Picajet. These are fine if you're touching up some holiday snaps, but they aren't going to let you 'edit' images as such.
At the other end of the scale is a program called The GIMP - or GNU Image Manipulation Program. Originally designed as a Photoshop equivalent for the Linux operating system, it has been around for over a decade, and offers all the functionality you'd expect, and more besides. Although I've used it on and off for several years, I still find it hard to get used to: the Windows version works perfectly well, but it clearly hasn't been built with Windows in mind.
The competition looks set to reach another level later this year, when Adobe releases a web-based version of Photoshop. A couple of sites already offer reasonable editing functionality within the browser: Picnik has been a lifesaver for me, on one or two occasions when 'proper' imaging software wasn't available, and Fauxto comes highly recommended (although I don't know it myself). But the Photoshop brand is so strong, that these smaller operations risk being blown out of the water.
Given the choice, unless you absolutely need a particular function, I'd plump for Paint.NET every time. It has plenty of complex tools, but makes them all remarkably simple. Unfortunately, it doesn't do absolutely everything - and because it lacks one or two tools I tend to use quite heavily, I'll still be keeping my trusty old copy of Photoshop to hand. For now, anyway.
Tags: adobe, fauxto, gimp, paint.net, photo editing, photoshop, picajet, picasa, picnik
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