Best Photo Editing Software Photo editing software, here's the best!

There are a lot of photo editors around but there's no question that Adobe's CS5 Extended and the free Open Source Gimp are the two most powerful photo editing software around. But depending how you define the best, these two bad boys may not be the best. along with all that power comes a very steep learning curve that many will never overcome.

So let's take a realistic look at the leading photo editing software programs and see what might be the best photo editing software for you. Depending on what functionality you want, you may not want to deal with the time and effort necessary to overcome the steep learning curve on Photoshop or Gimp.

Best Photo Editing Software For Beginners

If you just want to crop, lighten or darken, change size or file type (like gif or jpg) or do simple photo editing the best choice I've seen is a program called Infranview. This is a small and free photo editor that can do a lot of very basic editing functions and is easy to learn. It's totally menu driven and has great help files to show you how to do all the basics. Perfect for the beginner or basic photo editing chores.

Best Photo Editing Software for Intermediates

OK, I'm going out on a limb here and going to recommend an online photo editing software website called FotoFlexer.com. This is a great photo editor that can let you knock out backgrounds, take out blemishes, color correct, and much more. And it's free and comes with many tutorial videos that can get you up to speed in minutes. This is as easy and fast as it gets for second level photo editing for the person who wants more that just changing size but really doesn't want to spend hours learning how.

Best Photo Editing Software For Serious Amateurs

There are two good choices of photo editing software for those that need to be able to manipulate many of the aspects of a digital photo. Not necessary 10 layers of editing with special effects on each one but some serious changes need to to be addressed. My two choices are quite similar in operation but different in that one is online (and free) and the other is Adobe's little brother to CS5, Photo Elements 9. If you are a web developer or serious amateur photographer these two photo editing software programs are a good fit. They have about 85% of the CS5 capabilities but only about 50% of the learning curve. The online program is at Pixlr.com and when you look at the two you'll quickly see how similar they are in operation. I'd give the edge to Photo Elements 9 right now due to the speedier operation on the desktop and a lot of tutorials on the web in general.

Best Photo Editing Software for Professional 
Graphic Designers and Photographers

OK, now it's time for the biggest and most serious photo editing software on the planet. One of the huge advantages of both of these editors is that many plugins are available that make some of the most sophisticated features both easier and faster to create. Another big factor is there are so many different books, tutorials, and tips on the Interent to help with getting the most out of each program. But you will curse both of these editors when you hit that wall on some very specific feature. Gimp is a little more difficult than CS5, and usally a little behind the curve on new features. But it's price is right, since it's Open Source software and free for the downloading.

The amount of possibilities with each are only limited by your skill but with those high end abilities comes with some necessary dedication to learning the basics. And if you can't grasp the layers concept you are in big trouble. I use CS4 everyday and still don't know about 75% of the full feature set.

So there you have my suggestions. I'm sure there are other photo editing software programs that do a good job but these are the best photo editing software programs that I recommend depending on what you want to do and how much time and effort you want to spend in learning new software.

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