Free Picture Editing Software Some great and easy photo editing software programs!

If you want to enter into the serious realm of picture editing, there are a couple of choices. GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), which is free and Adobe PhotoShop CS4 that retails for about $699.00. These two programs are both the most sophisticated and powerful photo editing software programs available. Both have the ability to do just about any type of editing to any digital photo and much more.

With power comes a pretty serious learning curve. If you have never used any picture editing software, GIMP or Adobe Photoshop CS4 might not be your best choice. There are less powerful photo editing software programs with easy to learn and use features. Here's a good article on our choices for easy and free picture editing software here: Easy Photo Editing Software.

But if you want to do some serious picture editing, GIMP is worth the time and effort to learn. As far as free photo editor software, GIMP is the most powerful and popular choice. GIMP has many capabilities and can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, and more. GIMP also runs on all platforms like Linux, MAC, Windows, and Unix. Most free photo editor software is limited in abilities but GIMP is very robust and has many high end features.

Here's just a few of the main features of GIMP:

Painting 

• Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc. 

• Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing 

• Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool 

• Supports custom brushes and patterns 

System 

• Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space 

• Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time 

Advanced Manipulation 

• Full alpha channel support 

• Layers and channels 

• Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace) 

• Editable text layers 

• Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip 

• Selection tools including rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy 

• Foreground extraction tool 

• Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections. 

• Transformable paths, transformable selections. 

• Quickmask to paint a selection. 

Extensible 

• A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu 

• Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl) 

• Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters 

• Over 100 plug-ins already available 

Animation 

• Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format 

• MNG support 

• Frame Navigator (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package) 

• Onion Skin (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package) 

• Bluebox (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package) 

File Handling 

• File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others 

• Load, display, convert, save to many file formats S

• VG path import/export 

GIMP Screenshot of Windows Version

As you can see there a lot of features and capabilities that you can use to manipulate any aspect of a digital photo. The program is large in size and you want a computer that has a good video card, lots of ram, and processing power to use it. Due to the nature of many rendering processes, you need some pretty good hardware to power the these types of processes. Even though GIMP is a free picture editing software, there is a lot of support from the huge group of users.

There are plenty of tutorial and help websites that provide step by step instructions on most popular scenarios too. GIMP is what we call open source software and is supported by 1000's of users and developers for free. You can learn more about the support and find many tutorials for beginners on the GIMP home website at www.gimp.org. The download is available in many formats so be careful to get the proper one for your operating system.

This software was designed for the serious amateur photographer to take complete control over any picture editing chores. Special effects and retouching controls are available for just about any situation and if you are willing to make the effort to learn the methods, GIMP can do the rest. 

Since it's the premier free photo editor software, you can download and try it for awhile at no cost. And with all the support, tutorials, and forums on the many features you will have plenty of help in learning the software. Give it a spin and see what you think.

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