Freeware Photo Editing Software
Reviews and ratings of quality, hand-picked, websites
GIMP 
• www.gimp.org
Program Type: Image Manipulation
Photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. This is program is comparable to Photoshop. There are tutorials on the website to get you going. When you click on the link above choose either GIMP for Windows, GIMP for MAC or GIMP for UNIX, located about halfway down the page.
Find educational and practical resources for the GIMP at Gimp Savvy - http://gimp-savvy.com/index.html.
Completely free. This is an open source program.
Platforms Supported: UNIX, Windows, Mac OS X
Photoscape 
• www.photoscape.org
Program Type: Photo Editing
Excellent photo editor with many very nice editing features. The intuitive interface means you can be up and running with this program in no time. And it has quite a lot of other useful features including:
Viewer,
batch editor,
animated GIF maker,
splitter,
nice screen capture facility,
excellent color picker,
rename facility and
raw converter. Very nice.
Platform: Windows
PhotoPlus 6
• http://www.freeserifsoftware.com
Program Type: Photo Editing and Animation
Impressive. Very professional package from Serif - it even includes layers and animation facilites. There are also tutorials that you can download. The program is free but to use you need to register with them.
Platform: Windows
PhotoFiltre (Free Version)
• www.photofiltre.com
Program Type: Photo Editing
(Look down the left had menu under Freeware for the free version). The layout of this program is a little like Photoshop, but with no layers. On the other hand, you can adjust brightness, contrast, colours, shadows, replace colour, transformations, batch processing, and lots more. Plus many artistic filters. There is even a basic drawing tool palette which includes a clone tool. Very easy to use and fast loading. The paid for version has more features and is not expensive. Plug ins and tutorials available on the website. From the web developer Antonio Da Cruz.
Platform: Windows
VCW Vicman's Photo Editor
• www.vicman.net
Program Type: Photo Editing
Photo editing with basic painting/drawing capabilites. Transformations such as fish eye effects etc are built in. There are 3 plugins installed but - and this is a great feature - you can very easily import Photoshop plugins to use with this program. Another thing I like about this program is the preview zooming window that allows you to very easily zoom in and out and move easily from one part of an image to another. There is also a very good tutorial that comes with the program.
Incidentally, when you download this program you also get the chance to install Web Photo Album which allows you to create photo galleries for the web.
Platform: Windows
Active Pixels
• idea-systems.net
Program Type: Photo Editing
Photo editing with painting/drawing capabilites. You can use layers and also create animations. For me, this is not yet as impressive or useful as say Gimp or Photoscape, (and the version I am currently looking at (3.2) also tends to be a bit unstable) but having said that there are features that you might find useful, such as the screen capture utility and the picture viewer. Plus a large number of save options. Try it and see.
Platform: Windows
Paint.net
• www.getpaint.net
Program Type: Photo Editing/Paint Program
Despite the name (it started life as a small paint program), this is in fact a photo editing program as well as a paint program, with all the usual photo editing and paint tools, including layers. Fast loading, this is a very easy program to get to grips with.
Online community with tutorials and plugins.
Platform: Windows
Pixia
• http://park18.wakwak.com/~pixia/
Program Type: Paint Program
Very nice paint program with many features including layers and masks plus it has photo editing features. The program is completely free and stacks up very well against many paid for paint programs. Tutorials on the website plus more at http://www.angelfire.com/fang/derangedrook/pixiatutorial.html
Art Weaver
• www.artweaver.de
Program Type: Freeware Paint Program
Yet another great freeware paint program, with a huge variety of brushes and the ability to create endless variants. Also supports layers plus image adjustment features (hue, saturation etc) and a variety of filters. One useful filter for anyone making a web page is texture:seamless with which you can make images that tile. Also pen tablet support for the real painters out there. If you don't want to pay hundreds of pounds for Corel Painter, then check this out. And having said that, the image adjustment tools are almost good enough to rival those of Photoshop, so as well as being a great paint program, it is also pretty good at photo editing.
Platforms: Windows
Image Forge 
• www.cursorarts.com/ca_imffw.html
Program Type: Freeware Paint/Photo Editing Program
This is the freeware version of Image Forge (there are paid for versions you can upgrade to).
Photo editing plus fairly basic paint facilities, although it does alow you to paint with patterns. A nice feature is that you can paint with icons - there are a number already loaded and you can always find more on the web (you are looking for files with extension .icl which you save to the ImageForge folder on lyour computer). You can also use the program to make slide shows.
Platforms: Windows
Fotosizer
• www.fotosizer.com
Program Type: Freeware Batch Image Resizing
Want to send you digital photos by email? Or share them on the web? Then you probably want to reduce the size of them. This program allows you to do a whole load in one go.
Just add a folder, decide on your settings, choose the destination folder
and voilla!
Platforms: Windows
Rename4u
• www.kellysoftware.com/software/Rename4u.asp
Program Type: Freeware File Renaming
Rename a batch of photos in one go. Very useful for digital camera users. Ever looked at a folder of photos from your digital camera and thought "I can't be bothered to rename all those"? With this program the whole thing can be done in seconds.
Platforms: Windows
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