Five of the Best Photo Editing Software Programs with Free Alternatives

Those who work with photos, website design, designing fliers or creating newsletters can benefit from using photo editing software. Photo editing software is also useful for individuals who do business with online auctions such as Ebay or sell craft items like at Etsy. For photos that may have not turned out the initial way when first taken, photo software can enable us to fix them up some with graphics, changing tones or cropping methods. Some photo editing software will work better than others, depending on what you would like your finished photo to look like.

The first type of photo editing software was chosen from Consumer Research. Adobe Photoshop Elements is one of the most popular software that has been chosen by consumers and experts. It is user-friendly, and has tools that can change under or over-exposed photos-making them have a much more natural appearance. It also has a photo organizer to help those who have hundreds of photos within their stock too. There is also a photo cropping tool for changing sizes of photos or just selecting a portion of the photo that you would like features as well. It is compatible with both Macs and most versions of Windows. Adobe Photoshop Elements is available at Amazon for about $140.

Google Picasa is unique by the way it offers face recognition and allowing the ability to add geographical data. It also has been deemed popular by Consumer Research.com. With face recognition, it will automatically organize photos by who is in the photo. Google Picasa not only offers photo editing tools, but also offers an online photo album that shares photo with other web users all over the world. Additional online storage costs about $500/year. It can be downloaded online for free.

Another free download for photo editing software is GIMP. It is simple to use and user-friendly. For those who may not be able to afford the fancy tools of adobe, they can use GIMP as their free alternative. It is compatible with Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. With GIMP, users can change colors on a photo, fix photo perspectives, retouch and clone. Many of the available features are similar to that of other expensive photo editing software. GIMP can be downloaded for free via its website (see resources).

Other budget-friendly photo editing software that is free is Photoscape. It continuously has upgrades and is changing its software to make it more user-friendly and current with today's technology. Some of the features include a photo viewer, color picker, animated GIF, batch editor and a splitter. It also offers editing tools that can change a photo's size, white balance, and also remove red eye. It also allows for screen-shots capturing online images as well. This photo editing software is useful for basic editing and simple photo re-touching without having to worry about learning to use other advanced features. It also can be downloaded for free via its website (see resources).

The last photo editing software that is useful for professional photographers is the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. It has been chosen best by editors at Consumer Research.com. Some of its features include lens correction, image water-marking, and film grain simulation and can easily import images from a camera, or other drive and folders. Beginners may find the Adobe Photoshop more difficult to use, as it has been created for advanced users and photographers. It is also somewhat costly at about $250.

So for those in search of a preferred photo editing software, some of the basic ones that are free work just as well as the more expensive ones. More expensive photo software is for professionals, while those just looking for simplicity can make do with the free ones available on the web.

RESOURCES:

http://www.consumersearch.com/photo-editing-software/review

http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/photoshopelwin/

http://picasa.google.com/

www.gimp.org

www.photoscape.org

http://www.adobe.com/mena/products/photoshoplightroom/