Most of us don’t need the power of a high end (read: expensive), photo editor like Adobe Photoshop, the trendsetter/innovator for all photo editor and image manipulation software.
Instead, we’re looking for an application that’s small, fast, and hopefully free, with an intuitive interface that’s easy to use; especially for those with only modest previous experience.
Photoscape, last updated May 29, 2010, is a free photo editing application with a drag and drop interface, that meets, and in fact, exceeds those requirements.
You don’t have to take advantage of all of the powerful features built into this impressive application of course – see fast facts below. You can just stick to those tools you are most familiar with, including resizing, cropping, correcting red eye, .…………
As well, you can perform a wide variety of additional image adjustments, including brightness, contrast, and applying a host of special effects.
An unusual aspect of the Photoscape opening screen interface is its circular layout, as this screen capture illustrates. A very cool presentation!
Photoscape offers feature rich online help, supplemented with video for those of us who are into, “show me how” mode. The following screen capture illustrates the video running the Bright/Contrast help feature. I give this a big “thumbs up”.
Photoscape Fast Facts:
Viewer: View photos in your folder, create a slideshow
Editor: resizing, brightness and color adjustment, white balance, backlight correction, frames, balloons, mosaic mode, adding text, drawing pictures, cropping, filters, red eye removal, blooming, clone stamp
Batch editor: Batch edit multiple photos
Page: Merge multiple photos on the page frame to create one final photo
Combine: Attach multiple photos vertically or horizontally to create one final photo
Animated GIF: Use multiple photos to create a final animated photo
Print: Print portrait shots, passport photos
Splitter: Slice a photo into several pieces
Screen Capture: Capture your screenshot and save it
Color Picker: Zoom in on images, search and pick a color
Rename: Change photo file names in batch mode
Raw Converter: Convert RAW to JPG
Paper Print: Print lined, graph, music and calendar paper
Face Search: Find similar faces on the Internet
Languages: English, Korean, Chinese, Traditional Chinese, German, Dutch, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Mexico, Latin America), French, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Colombian), Thai, Hungarian, Turkish, Catalan, Slovak, Czech, Norwegian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Swedish, Estonian, Danish, Romanian, Hebrew, Galician, Finnish, Indonesian and Arabic.
System requirements: Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/Vista/Win 7.
Download at: Download.com
For the Geeky Photographer:
Image Analyzer 1.30
If you’re a geeky photographer, then Image Analyzer could be just the program you’ve been searching for. This small (1.24MB), free, advanced, feature-rich image editor, comes complete with serious enhancement and analytical tools.
At the advanced level, this is not a program for the faint of heart, and requires a good understanding of photographic techniques. Check it out at “Free Image Analyzer 1.30 -Professional Photo Editor” on this site.
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Bill Mullins' Weblog - Tech Thoughts 