Photo Editing Software

[Dave Jay]

I'm currently looking for free photo editors to download, not online editors. Does anyone have any recommendations? I don't need all the bells and whistles, on my pc I use Microsoft Office Photo Editor, but I don't have Office on my netbook so I'm looking for something similar. All I need to do is crop, adjust contrast and brightness. I like that the office editor allows you to adjust separate tone ranges individually. I downloaded Paint.Net but I'm not entirely happy with the tone adjustment.
Any recommendations?

I should mention that I'm using Windows 7.

 

[Mr. P]

Since you use MS Office and like that have you tried Apache OpenOffice? It is very similiar to MS office but it is free and fully compatible with MS Office.
https://www.openoffice.org/

 

[Dave Jay]

Since you use MS Office and like that have you tried Apache OpenOffice? It is very similiar to MS office but it is free and fully compatible with MS Office.
https://www.openoffice.org/

That sounds good to me, I really just like to crop, then adjust contrast and tone to compensate for the flash, I don't play with anything else, I use paint if I want to add lettering like "signing" my pictures.
I'll look into that now, thanks.

 

[Dave Jay]

Since you use MS Office and like that have you tried Apache OpenOffice? It is very similiar to MS office but it is free and fully compatible with MS Office.
https://www.openoffice.org/

I tried Apache Office, and it does do a lot, but I wasn't quite happy with the photo editing, not that it was bad. I had tried Paint.Net , and I downloaded IrfanView but still wasn't happy. I plan to download GIMP because that seems highly recommended, but tonight I was fiddling around offline and I realised that the windows live photo viewer can edit pics, I had only downloaded windows live because movie maker didn't come installed on the computer, I hadn't even looked at the rest of the programs. It is the closest to the editing I was looking for so far! A bit of a Duh moment! I'll still check out others but this is usable, I can go through a whole folder editing or deleting pics one by one without having to open and close individual pictures.

Not too bad, and these pictures weren't perfect focus, I only got two quick pics and she hid. Usually I would take multiple pictures with different focus points in each one, delete the obvious failures and crop and edit what's left comparing and deleting as I go until only the very best are left, it's a lot of sorting but worth it I think, I often get them printed out 8"x8" and the cream of the crop look professional imo.
I should point out that the tarantula is Phlogius rubiseta as it was when unpacked, it's much more plump now.

 

[Yvonne G]

I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but I use Irfanview. It works well for what I use it for.

 

[Dave Jay]

I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but I use Irfanview. It works well for what I use it for.

I have downloaded Irfanview, I really haven't given it a long enough trial to be honest.

 

[Whitelightning777]

Try GIMP.

It's open source and just as good as anything from Adobe. It runs on PCs, not sure about Android or mobile apps.

If you use Linux, it's probably already built in and also runs on Mac as well.

 

[Dave Jay]

Try GIMP.

It's open source and just as good as anything from Adobe. It runs on PCs, not sure about Android or mobile apps.

If you use Linux, it's probably already built in and also runs on Mac as well.

Yes, I keep hearing good things about gimp, I think I'll give it a shot, thanks .

 

[Dave Jay]

Cameras and photo editors came up in a thread today and reminded me of this thread.
To update my experience, I tried all the editors mentioned in this thread and a few others and ended up using Faststone, a free editor. Not because it had the most features but because it had what I needed, a simple "exposure" interface where contrast and brightness can be adjusted plus colour saturation, adjusting for the flash basically, these adjustments can be used on the next photo or some or all reset each time. There's also a simple crop interface that allows you to add custom crop sizes to a list for easy use later, and you can navigate through the folder without closing the interface, cropping as you go. The cropped pictures can be saved to the clipboard or saved as a separate photo "lossless" file.
The pictures are seen full screen and you can go forward and backward with arrows making it easy to compare one to another and delete the ones you don't want.
On the down side is that you have to save changes before you can go to the next or previous photo, which can slow things down sometimes, Microsoft Office editor saves all changes when exiting the program which can take a little while but by then 300 photos may have been whittled down to 30 anyway, no time was spent saving changes to pictures that ended up being deleted unlike with Faststone. Also, there are only adjustments for highlights and shadows, no midtone adjustment in the "exposure" interface although other adjustment interfaces are available.
Apart from those two things it does what I want plus many more features I could, but don't use and it's free.
Some of the other editors were similar, but took a long time going from one picture to the next.

I thought perhaps we could expand on this thread and list software that we each like, both for editing photos and for videos so that we have a resource for to go to when looking for software.

 

[Arachnoclown]

I just got a galaxy note 9....its a beast a editing photos. I dont even know how to use everything on it yet.

 

[Whitelightning777]

That'll be my next one. Currently, I just use the S8 Galaxy note. Overall, they are very similar. The S9 has a better battery and a few other improvements.