Okay, you can’t stitch photos into a panorama, you can’t change perspective, you can’t do layers and you often can’t make changes in selected areas of images. PhotoFiltre offers a bevy of plug-ins that allow you to perform image magic-ripple effects, red-eye removal, page curl effects, highlight/shadow tricks, etc.Īnyone who doesn’t want to waste time learning the intricacies of photo tweaking can start with something as non-fussy as PhotoFiltre. Settings and controls are often limited or available in preset increments. You are not bewildered by sliders and cluttered dialogue boxes and don’t have to dive in and out of menus looking for things. One of the best things about it is its uncomplicated up-front interface. It has the necessary work tools you require to play with colour, saturation and effects. Relatively much more simple and straightforward than the others in this lot, PhotoFiltre is like a stripped-down version of an image editor. And it helps, of course, that it does the job in the process. So why have we included it here? Because it is a nice, free, non-intimidating application with which to get your hands dirty and learn the ropes before moving on to a heftier tool. That said, however, its halted development gives it the appearance of an abandoned project. GIMPShop is everything GIMP-loaded with all its feature and function assets as well as its customizability- but with some alterations in interface and terminology that make it easier to use. While it does achieve this to a large extent, it has not been able to keep up with the version enhancements in GIMP in recent years. GIMPshop, in fact, was created to give GIMP a more Photoshop-like look and feel. This modification of GIMP sheds some of its clutter and gives it an easier-to-use look and feel. If you feel somewhat hemmed in by the profusion of tools and menus in GIMP but want to harness its power, try GIMPShop. Still, you can’t help marvelling at the awesome abilities packed into this almost tiny (for an image editor) application. For instance, it has no sophisticated colour correction, selection tools, cannot handle RAW output or convert formats. There are a few things missing in Paint.NET, though. On lower-end PCs and laptops, the sliders tend to be jumpy, freezing the machine in the process, which is very unsettling. You can create new gradient layers, adjust layer-blend modes and opacities, apply/adjust filters and effects and do much more. Special effects include distortion, embossing, and 3D rotate/zoom effects to add perspective and tilting. It has an easy and intuitive interface, supports layers, special effects, and a variety of useful tools (splines or Bézier curves, magic wand, clone stamp, text editor, zoom, recolour, etc.). The 1.5MB Paint.NET is a photo manipulator that began as a Microsoft-mentored undergraduate senior design project to replace MS Paint. All in all, Photoscape is a very useful and comprehensive image handler that every photo junkie simply must download. My favourite feature is its ability to convert RAW (digital SLR camera files) formats to JPG-something none of the other apps here gave me. With that range of tools, the easy-looking, “spread-out" interface makes the learning curve that much easier. The photo editor handles all your resizing, brightness and colour adjustment, white balance, backlight correction, framing, cropping, filter, red-eye removal, blooming, and other needs. In fact, at 14.7MB, it’s a tad lighter than GIMP, at 16.5MB. With so many diverse capabilities, you would expect this do-it-all to be one heavy download. You get everything here-from a file viewer to photo editor, a slide-show creator to a batch editor for file renaming, a screen-capture program to an animated GIF maker, a photo-stitcher to a photo- splitter. But if you’re not, you won’t even notice these shortcomings.įeatures, features, and more features. If you’re an avid Photoshopper, you may also growl at the less intuitive interface, missing layer effects, and its inability to go from RGB to CMYK. Also, because it belongs to the open-source genre, GIMP is prone to frequent updates. On the downside, what I don’t like about GIMP are the extra-wide floating control menus that tend to overlap the image on small screens.
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