Now I realise that at least most people in the world need to manipulate images at one time or another. Most people would have used photoshop at least at one point in their lives, however also find that the cost of such a powerful program outweighs the need for touching up the occasional photo, or manipulating an image to put on your website. I have found two applications, that are incredibly powerful, however have no cost involved, and have more features than the average user will ever have need for.

The first one I’ll tell you about is Paint.net. This is a Microsoft-style paint editor, so for the die-hard windows fans, this is probably the one to go for if everything you have needs to be cohesive with your Windows. Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. So this is a great open-source piece of software available for download. The only thing you need is .net Framework 2.0 which you can download from the Microsoft site, if you don’t have it already.Any further details, including it’s very modest resource requirements, (can run on anything that can run XP), are available on the download page. Oh and if you are scared to download it to try it, don’t be, it’s only 1.5 meg!

My personal favourite though has to be GIMP. GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and I had been using this for years on one of my Linux machines. At first I used it for just simple photo editing, cropping, resizing, putting speech bubbles over my friends heads and making them say funny things, but then I found that it was incredibly powerful. Some of the not-so-well-known features of GIMP are, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter and there are many more! Check out the full list of program features. There is even a whole plug-in registry to do just about everything else that it can’t already do! I highly recommend GIMP and hope that you take the time to check it out. Oh and in case you were wondering, yes it runs on Linux, MacOS and Windows, can run on almost anything, (Any system capable of running Gnome 2, KDE 3.2, Windows 2000, Mac OS X and later versions should be able to run GIMP.), so don’t fear EVERYONE can use it, so you have no reason not to download it.

If anyone has any more free image editors, please do comment below!

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