Best Free Digital Image Editor

I love digital photography.  I also love when I capture one of those perfect pictures where the subject, composition, lighting, and color are just right.  But let's face it, most of the time our photos need a little coaxing to get them to look like we want them.   There is a proliferation of free image editing and photo correction tools floating around out there and trying to find just the right one can be a little daunting.  After evaluating over 30+ programs, I narrowed it down to a handful.   I broke these down into three sub-categories, basic, mid-level, and advanced.

The basic category is for those little gems that help you quickly and easily make small adjustments to the overall lighting, colors, and tones of your images without the clutter of a lot of advanced tool sets.  These also offer such tools as cropping, sharpening, and red eye correction.

The mid-level category offers more advanced tools like layers, adding captions and shapes, the ability to select portions of the image and make adjustments to just those portions, etc.   These will also offer filters for applying textures, artistic effects, edge enhancements, boarders and frames.

The advanced category will include tools that are comparable to professional programs like Photoshop, or Paint Shop Pro.

LightBox Image Editor is an excellent little utility that I fell in love with after just a couple of minutes of using it.   It has an attractive user interface that is simple and straight forward, and offers intuitive slide-bar adjustments for your images.  It also has split screen views to help you compare your images before and after the corrections have been made.  It includes simple tools to correct red-eye, sharpen, crop, re-size, add borders, and print.  I like LightBox so well I decided to upgrade to the Pro version which offers some very nice extras, but the free version is a gem that you will want to check out.  This is my basic editor Top Pick!

Photo! Editor Screen ShotPhoto! Editor is a basic photo correction utility with a few professional quality tools.  It has all of the basic enhancement tools to adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, and color cast, and some retouching or "make-up" tools that work similar to the coveted healing brush in Photoshop.  Be sure to pay attention to the little down arrows next to the tool bar icons.  Those will help you access the more powerful manual options.

PhotoFiltre  is a nice basic to mid-level editor with a good feature set.  Simple adjustments can be made fairly quickly using the tool bar buttons, or you can make more advanced adjustments by delving deeper into the menus.  There is a nice set of tools for selecting parts of images, doing simple painting, and smudging, drawing basic shapes, and adding text. PhotoFiltre also has a good selection of filters to add effects to your images, and can do batch processing of images.

Paint.Net Screen ShotPaint.Net makes a very good mid-level photo retouching choice.  It has a nice set of photo correction tools including curves, and levels.  It has a very nice implementation of layers complete with blending modes, and adjustable opacity/transparency levels.  It has a fairly full pallet of selection, painting, and shape drawing tools. It is completed with a selection of filters for adding special effects to your images.  All in all, it offers a lot for a free image retouching software.  Be aware it requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or newer to be installed.

Artweaver - If you don't want the .NET Framework, or simply would like another option other than Paint.Net you should have a look at this.  Although it is more focused on being a painting program, it has a very good array of image adjustment tools. Artweaver also has a curves and levels tool that works a little better than Paint.Net, in my opinion.  Other than that they are similar programs, with comparable functionality.

GIMP  is currently the only freeware package I am aware of that can be called an advanced image editor.  It has a steeper learning curve than the previously reviewed editors, but it is feature rich.  It's multi-windowed interface makes it a little unusual for a windows program.  If a more Photoshop style environment is desired two choices are available;  GimPhoto  and GimpShop   These are user interface modifications of GIMP designed to give GIMP more of the feel of Photoshop. GimPhoto is probably preferred over GimpShop currently because the latter has not been updated for quite awhile and only supports Win XP.  If you are inexperienced at using image editing programs GIMP will likely be too overwhelming to start learning on, so I would suggest beginning with one of the basic, or mid-level editors above.

Photoscape  -This is really a different class product than the editors above in that it does things that are beyond the focus of the average editor, and is more of an image suite.  I have had a number of users request that this product be included and have finally decided to oblige.  Once you get used to its unusual interface you will find it is much more than a photo editor.   It includes a batch function utility, a couple of collage creation tools, a gif animator,  a batch renaming utility, a raw image converter,  a screen capture utility, an image splitter, a photo layout and printing utility, and several other tools. The editor itself is quite robust. While it lacks many of the usual region selection, brush, and cloning style tools,  it has a nice selection of manual and auto color correction tools. It also has the ability to run filters and add frames, add text, shapes, call-out boxes, and other objects that work similar to vector objects until jointed with the image or the image is saved.   It also includes about 500 clip-art images that can be placed on your photos.   While I would still prefer one of the other image editors above for my usual correction and retouching work,  many users will probably find its tools are more than adequate and will have fun using its extended features.  I think most will find it a worthy companion to their other image tools.

You might also want to look at the Best Free Web-Based Image Editor and Best Free Paint Program for other programs with some similar functions to those above.  Also Picasa 3 has some very easy to use correction tools and is featured as the 'top pick' under Best Free Digital Photo Organizer.

Some of the other Free Digital Image Editors I reviewed are as follows.   Some are not too bad others are worthless.  You will just have to visit the websites if you what to know more.  It is advised to run a virus scan on these if you download them.