Best Free Photo Editing Software

Whether you have just come back from holiday and want to touch up some of your photos, or if you are an amateur photographer on a budget, having the best free photo editing software can help you to easily improve your photos.

And whilst professional photo editing software costing hundreds of dollars might make you think that it's not possible to get good quality picture editing software for free, this thankfully isn't true. There are many great free photo editing programs out there which will allow you to modify your digital images in many different ways.

This article will outline five of the most popular and best picture editing software programs which are available for free.

Some of the ones mentioned have more features (and thus can be more difficult to learn to use) than others, thus your choice will partly be based on what you intend to do with your photos (for example, if you solely want to use red eye removal, Picasa or Live Photo Gallery might be better for you).

As a result, we will be sure to mention who is be best suited to each software program as we discuss each one.

Paint.net

Paint.net is a very good, very feature-rich photo editing software. It includes dozens of features that you typically can only find on paid-for photo editing programs. Its interface is fairly easy-to-use, although if you plan on only touching up a few quick photos then this software might not be best for you. We feel it's better for someone who plans on editing and creating numerous digital images.

Screenshot of Paint.net

Please note that this piece of software is completely different to Microsoft Paint (a very basic image editing program that comes pre-installed on Microsoft Windows).

GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program

GIMP is similar to Paint.net in that it is a very good piece of software with many features. If anything though, we feel it has more features than Paint.net. However its interface is also fairly tricky to get used to at first hence GIMP does have a learning curve. Like Paint.net, we feel that GIMP is best suited to people who plan on working with digital images fairly frequently.

Screenshot of GIMP

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Windows Live Photo Gallery is a very basic photo 'editing' software. You can use it for red eye removal, although it has very few other features allowing you to edit photos. Is it mainly an image galley and it allows you to share photos via Windows Live. It comes pre-installed with Windows Vista and it can be downloaded for free using Windows 7. Hence if you mainly want to share your photos and use red eye removal, consider this program. Although be aware that it can't be used for any other photo editing features.

Windows Live Photo Gallery

Google Picasa

Picasa Web Albums by Google is similar to Windows Live Photo Gallery, although it has a greater number of image editing features. It can also be used to share photos easily via the internet. Some of its features include auto color correction, auto contract, red eye removal and more. Hence if you are looking for a very easy-to-use image editing program which also has photo gallery features, we'd suggest this program to you.

Screenshot of Google Picasa

Photoscape

Photoscape has more image editing tools and features than Google Picasa, but not as many as Paint.net or GIMP. However if you are very interested in editing images although feel that Paint.net or GIMP would be too difficult to get used to, Photoscape could be a good choice for you.

Screenshot of Photoscape


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