Not a day goes by that I don’t use at least one or two different image editing programs.  One of them is bundled with Microsoft Office.  That one generally gets used for simple things, like cropping or resizing photos for the posts you see here at PopFi.  The other one I use, Paint.Net, gets trotted out for tougher things like color balance, red eye reduction, and tougher graphics work (in addition to crops and resizes).  As it turns out, Paint.Net is one of the many free PhotoShop alternatives available.

If you’re a blogger or someone who doesn’t do graphics daily, NewsTechZilla points out that it’s not worth the money to pay for PhotoShop.  However, you’ll need something to manipulate images for web posting purposes.  That’s the beauty of free software!  In some cases, you can get all the useful features of more expensive programming, without the surcharge for a fancy brand name.

Paint.net is one of the more powerful and useful image editors, but the best one according to ReadWriteWeb is GIMP.  I’ve never used GIMP, so I couldn’t tell you what I think about it, but I can tell you that Paint.Net is excellent.  In fact, of the many free applications I use, Paint.Net is third-best next to Trillian (the all-in-one messenger service) and OpenOffice.

As I get older and money gets tighter, I find that the branded software isn’t quite as good as it once was, and that store-brand imitation software is often better and more stable.  Part of that is the maturation of freeware, and part of that is maturation of this particular user.  Why buy the Apple when you can get the Linux/BSD for free?

Tags: photoshop, image editing software, free software, free photoshop alternatives, freeware, graphics, photo editing, paint.net, GIMP, freeware, shareware

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