Paint.net vs Irfanview – Which one is better?

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I’m looking for a free image editing program as I don’t want to buy either Adobe Photoshop or Corel PaintShop Pro (or their lighter alternatives – Adobe Photoshop elements or Corel PaintShop Express). The price is very high for all programs, no matter the company behind them. I’ve heard about these two free programs – Paint.net and Irfanview – and was wondering if anybody here actually works with one of them and can give his opinion, and also if one of them is recommended.

My main uses are cropping, making pics brighter or darker and resizing.

TIA

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I don’t blame you, the learning curve for the Adobe Photoshop & Corel PaintShop Pro is quite high just for simple modding.
Try these…

Windows Live Photo gallery & paint.net in windows 7 or Vista does the [simple] job nicely for free.
Windows Live Photo gallery & paint.net on my Windows XP Laptop.

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I don’t blame you, the learning curve for the Adobe Photoshop & Corel PaintShop Pro is quite high just for simple modding.
Try these…

Windows Live Photo gallery & paint.net in windows 7 or Vista does the [simple] job nicely for free.
Windows Live Photo gallery & paint.net on my Windows XP Laptop.

This is a good answer. I have Photoshop Cs3 and paint.net is a good free program.Windows Live works for simple edits. Tried many other photo like Googles Picasa to invasive.

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Paint.net is excellent for a freebie, you might also want to check out Faststone Image viewer which lets you edit in full screen with nice popup menus to each side of the screen so its as close to working with dual monitors (one for picture one for edit controls) on one screen.

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Don’t forget GIMP!

cheers, Paul

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Don’t forget GIMP!

cheers, Paul

Paul – I’ve heard that Gimp is buggy, has a very non-intuitive UI and is very confusing to use in general.

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Don’t forget GIMP!

cheers, Paul

I’ll vote with Paul, It’s not too hard to get used to.

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I agree with Paul that GIMP is worth thinking about, but it sounds as though it would be more complicated than you want to have to learn how to use it. So here’s another suggestion – Picasa. It’s free. It does a great job of organising photos, and it has good basic facilities to do things like crop, straighten, re-size, correct red-eye, adjust brightness, contrast, etc. 

Ian

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I recommend getting both Paint.net & Irfanview, they both have strengths in different areas. Irfanview works great for organizing and quick and simple resizing and adjustments. Irfanview has a lot of plug-ins but I believe that Paint.net has a little more flexibility and capability in editing and other ‘higher’ level functions. The two together give you a lot of free capability, and neither are difficult to learn.

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Gimp is a very good program, very potent and effective, but it’s interface is among the worst I have ever seen.

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Gimp is a very good program, very potent and effective, but it’s interface is among the worst I have ever seen.

I replied to this post, with a screen shot of how I have GIMP looking, which I hoped showed that the interface could be made to look quite good, but the reply seems to have disappeared now, though I am not sure why.

Ian

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Thank you all for your replies.

What about UI? who has the better, simpler UI?

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Thank you all for your replies.

What about UI? who has the better, simpler UI?

I still think that for the purposes you mentioned at the beginning, Picasa does what you want, and is straightforward to use. Personally, I find IrfanView very useful for some things, but I don’t find the user interface that obvious. It is some time now since I tried Paint.net, but my memory of it is that it is quite user-friendly.

But really, only you can answer that question. Which one do you find easiest to work with? 

Ian

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I have and use the GIMP, Photoshop Elements, and Paint.net. The one I use the most by far is Paint.net.

Nothing wrong with Elements, but for the day-to-day image manipulations I do, Paint.net is the most straightforward.

If you annotate your images–for example, showing a picture of a motherboard and circling the CPU cooler–Paint.net does this more easily than the other two. I have used the GIMP for annotation and it isn’t so good. (In fact, I mostly keep the GIMP around just because I have so many old files in that format.) Paint.net has line tools and arrows–very important for that use.

Cropping is a two step process in Paint.net. It also does level control and has a selection of common filters. Another thing you often do when annotating screenshots is to redact certain information from the image that you don’t want to show the world, like user names, private IP addresses, etc. Select and Gaussian Blur (most any paint program has this) works nicely.

I’m an experienced user who would be smart enough to use full Photoshop if he could afford it. But when you are blogging, you want to do your graphics quickly and Paint.net does that very well.

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The GIMP is excellent, and personally I find the UI more intuitive than Photoshop. Where the GIMP falls short is that it does not support 16 files. But for you that may not be a big deal.

Take a look also at Serif PhotoPlus. They have a free version, and a $10 version. These are of course are not their current versions, but they are pretty decent for most general photo editing and are easy to use.
Free Serif PhotoPlus

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There are a couple more programs that come to mind – XnView and FastStone Image Viewer. Anyone here knows about them or has worked with them?

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I mentioned FastStone in my post #3. It’s excellent, my number one used program, love the UI, the viewer and thumbnail integration, the compatibility with a wide range of formats, the quality of the resize filter, the batch processing, the full screen editing layout. There’s nothing I don’t like about FastStone except it doesn’t open on last folder if the last folder is a network location. XnView does open on last folder no matter what but its interface is a bit more clunky, equal to Irfanview I would say but overall not as capable but I tend to use if more than Irfanview because it also integrates the viewer with the thumbnail browser better.

Still they are all three free and if you include Picasa, I’m sure you find one of them fits very well, maybe even a combination of 2 or more, because each may be strong in different areas and be useful for different tasks.

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I mentioned FastStone in my post #3. It’s excellent, my number one used program, love the UI, the viewer and thumbnail integration, the compatibility with a wide range of formats, the quality of the resize filter, the batch processing, the full screen editing layout. There’s nothing I don’t like about FastStone except it doesn’t open on last folder if the last folder is a network location. XnView does open on last folder no matter what but its interface is a bit more clunky, equal to Irfanview I would say but overall not as capable but I tend to use if more than Irfanview because it also integrates the viewer with the thumbnail browser better.

Still they are all three free and if you include Picasa, I’m sure you find one of them fits very well, maybe even a combination of 2 or more, because each may be strong in different areas and be useful for different tasks.

Byron – One of the things I take into account before installing new software is if there is a good support forum in case I need help with it, and I’ve noticed that FastStone doesn’t have any (even Google doesn’t find one). Maybe you know of such a forum?

Also, I understand that FastStone has a some kind of browser which organize your files and pics. Could really mess things up so that you won’t even find your own files…

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Pant.net has a forum.
GIMP has a forum.
Irfanview has a forum.

Just pick something a try it. If you don’t like it, uninstall it.

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I’m with Clint. You need to try these and see for yourself. More than most apps, digital imaging freeware is difficult to pin down. for your requirements IrfanView may do the job. For resizing, trimming and conversion it’s outstanding.

However, there’s no “best” program. They have different capabilities. Paint.net, for instance is very good and arguably better and more intuitive for most users than the GIMP. On the other hand, the GIMP is more powerful than any of the other freebies and would be the best choice for playing with colour profiles and other advanced editing.

You may find it handy to have 2 or 3 of them available. Use a basic program for the easy stuff and a more powerful program when you wish to get into serious editing.

There’s a very good review of most of the free digital editing programs here:
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-digital-editor.htm

🙂

Alan Vallis.

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Hi,

for simple and efficient photo-editing, I use a free application called Photoscape – it’s got quite some options, but it is a lot simpler to use than PhotoShop or Gimp, mainly because most of the tasks are menu-driven. When using it, you are applying non-destructive changes, that can all be undone, save whenever you are ready but the original will never be overwritten. I’ve been using this for the past few years and it has never let me down.

regards
Gabriel

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Again, thank you all for your replies.

Hi,

for simple and efficient photo-editing, I use a free application called Photoscape – it’s got quite some options, but it is a lot simpler to use than PhotoShop or Gimp, mainly because most of the tasks are menu-driven. When using it, you are applying non-destructive changes, that can all be undone, save whenever you are ready but the original will never be overwritten. I’ve been using this for the past few years and it has never let me down.

regards
Gabriel

Gabriel – This program looks quite an interesting editor. Never heard of it. Although, I’ve just read on the web that the menu system of it is not that intuitive. Also, PhotoScape too has no support forum as far as I can tell. Do you know any?

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PhotoFiltre 6.4 is an excellent FREE program. I use it more than Photoshop Elements; it uses fewer system resources and is usually all I need.

http://www.snapfiles.com/get/photofiltre.html

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According to Wikipedia, “GIMPshop is a modification of the free and open source graphics program GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), intended to replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop.”

I haven’t tried it because after a few years of occasional use, I’ve got used to GIMP’s less than lovable UI. But it does look like it might be worth a try.

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According to Wikipedia, “GIMPshop is a modification of the free and open source graphics program GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), intended to replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop.”

I’m generally not a fan of programs like that. GIMP on the inside is so different from Photoshop that you will notice. If you’re not used to Photoshop, it’s a complete hash.

I’d get into all the faults of GIMP and how it doesn’t really fit well into Windows but that’s another thread.

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According to Wikipedia, “GIMPshop is a modification of the free and open source graphics program GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), intended to replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop.”

I haven’t tried it because after a few years of occasional use, I’ve got used to GIMP’s less than lovable UI. But it does look like it might be worth a try.

GIMPshop is no longer being developed, afaik.
To answer the OP’s question, Irfanview is an image viewer on stealth mode. It will do far more than what you may need in most circumstances. I’ve tried Paint.NET, Photoscape, Fastone, Photofiltre and some of the others mentioned in this thread. They’re all very useful, but Irfanview remains my freeware choice. Fwiw, I normally work inside of Capture One 5, Lightroom 2, and Photoshop CS2, but I’ll still use Irfanview for quick-and-dirty .jpeg manipulation.

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Might I urge you to try Hornil Stylepix? No-one has mentioned it yet and I think it well deserves being brought to your attention.
I’ve used Paint Shop for years and been happy with it but discovered this little lightweight program that does everything I need it to do with my digital photos. It’s incredibly simple to use, it will crop, resize, sharpen and adjust brightness and colour at the click of a button and all changes can be easily reversed.
It’s “Auto” settings for brightness and colour adjustment work better than those in Paint Shop! I would thoroughly recommend it to you for it’s sheer simplicity of use.

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As a long time user of Photoshop, I am often asked this same question; “what are good alternatives?” For a viewer and sometimes editor, I highly recommend Irfanview (with it’s plug-ins). Irfanview will also play any audio, video, movie, etc., files. I feel that it is a better choice over Picasa, which is really more of a image database. For more involved retouching, including some really nice “one touch” operations, I recommend Photo Pos Pro. This program, until recently, was a commercial program, but is now free!

Gimp and Gimpshop are fine, but have a steep learning curve. Also, it sounds as though they are more advanced than what you need. I feel that two of the most needed features in a photo-editing app are “layers” and “blending modes”, both of which are in Photo Pos Pro.

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My vote goes to the free Photoscape. Although I did buy Corel PaintShop Pro X3 and have been using it for years, I use Photoscape for simple tasks and because of its fast launch.
I have Photoscape installed on all machines at home and work, but my laptop runs lean with only freeware or open source. I use nothing but Photoscape on the Laptop.
They just released a new version on May 24th (v3.5) but when you install it, it will try to install Google Toolbar by default. Make sure to uncheck it if you don’t want it.

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Do any of these free editing packages include green screen type editing, preferably for both still pictures and video, but green screen editing for video is my main need. My son wants to buy the Rip Roar Creation Station for this but I’ve read that’s pretty bad. He has a Flip Ultra HD video camera and would like to do green screen editing with that. I know I could get my own green screen or just get the right colored sheet for the “green screen”. Thanks!

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I’ve used GIMP and had become quite proficient at it (never used Photoshop). But I’m not a graphic artist and don’t really need the power of Photoshop or GIMP. I don’t think you need that either.

If you just want to brighten, add contrast, and crop photos, use Picasa. The added advantage of Picasa over the other image manipulation tools is that Picasa can organize your photos. You can put tags and captions on your images, tag people’s faces, and do quite a number of other image manipulation things (straighten, red eye, colour correction, adjust saturation, plus effects like sharpen, b&w, sepia, etc) . I have almost 33,000 photos (over 80 GB) in my Picasa library and if I type ‘strawberry’ into the search bar, it shows me all the photos that have strawberry in the file name, caption, tag, or name tag. BTW, the result bar says “Displaying 5 pictures in 5 albums (0.000 seconds)”, so the search is really fast.

One big thing I like about Picasa is that it doesn’t affect your original image (as someone mentioned) — you can undo all of your edits. I sometimes use Picasa to crop a photo down to a certain size, email it to someone (I have Picasa options set to size-reduce the image when emailing), and then Undo the crop or other edits to recover my original photo. And the bonus is that I don’t have all sorts of variants of the same image on my disk.

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How about picnik? You don’t need to download any software and it is easy to use.
http://www.picnik.com/app#/home/welcome

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i’ve used this one for years & still use even after buying Elements 7 & Capture NX
FlexPhotoDB
http://www.flexphotodb.com

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Well, I have used Photoshop 6 for years (because it was given to me), Photoshop Elements (because I got it on sale for about $80 when Elements 7 came out), and GIMP in Linux and I think Elements when you can get it on sale, is much better than GIMP, which pointed out above has a horrible interface. And the only book I have found on GIMP is not much better than the software itself.

I think the thing to do is get a version of Elements (not with the other junk sometimes bundled with it which raises the price) and then get a book on that version and learn how to use it. If you get a decent book, with a decent index, you can be doing stuff in a few minutes and it has much better capabilities than GIMP, in my opinion. I don’t believe the learning curve is all that bad with a book in one hand and computer in the other!

Karl

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I’m looking for a free image editing program as I don’t want to buy either Adobe Photoshop or Corel PaintShop Pro (or their lighter alternatives – Adobe Photoshop elements or Corel PaintShop Express). The price is very high for all programs, no matter the company behind them. I’ve heard about these two free programs – Paint.net and Irfanview – and was wondering if anybody here actually works with one of them and can give his opinion, and also if one of them is recommended.

My main uses are cropping, making pics brighter or darker and resizing.

TIA

I’m a fan of Google’s free Picasa 3. Its “one click” functions usually get me as good a result as 15 minutes of fiddling with GIMP or purchased software with similar capabilities. Cropping, making pics brighter or darker and resizing are all almost instantaneous. Picasa also does well with video, and I think I’ve seen tutorials on the ‘net that explain how to use it for “green screen” chroma-key editing. All this is wrapped in a photo album organizing system that works well for me.

It’s available for download at: http://picasa.google.com/

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I have used Irfanview for years and find it to have a low learning curve.
I also highly recommend Paint.net

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I have assembled one of the largest collection of free photo editors on the internet. It has all the ones you have mentioned here plus dozens of programs you probably never even heard of. The list goes back from today to sometime in January so everything is relatively fresh and almost all are free. Cruise the list, try them out and find one you like. (Gimp is the popular favorite).

This list was assembled from listings by MajorGeeks, Kim Komando, Betanews and PCWorld downloads.

http://www.rgbstock.com/forum/cat/7

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As the original question in this thread was “Paint.net vs Irfanview – Which one is better?”, some of the replies seem a bit off target.
I have used Irfanview for several years. I’ve tried many of the other image editors too – both free and paid, but I find that for 99% of the time, Irfanview does what I need as far as photo editing goes.
It’s quick to load, very easy to learn, fast in use and has numerous plugins for a multitude of extra functions should you need them.
Best of all, it’s free. What more do you need?

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Hmm…In the newsletter Tracey Heads the column as “Looking to the Lounge for a cheap photo editor” Looks like he was off point just a bit too.

Irfanview is much better than paint.net to answer the original question.

The new Photoshop CS5 that shipped early this month is so full of pure awesomeness it’s hard to consider using anything else for fine photo editing. It’s a heavy system resource user on top of being expensive.

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I found a nice little photo editor just today. It is called “Photo Pad Image Editor”
http://www.nchsoftware.com/photoeditor/index.html
It is simple, easy to understand and if you aren’t looking for layers etc. It is a
nice program.

There are good sites with great tutorials for Photoshop for instance, 3photoshop.com
You tube also has some good ones. Most any thing you learn about Adobe you can apply
to Gimp.

I have most of the list Cris posted and a few more. I am always looking for the
perfect little program. I would also recommend going to Giveawayoftheday.
They have free commercial programs every day. They also have a large freeware
library.

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If you’ve never tried it a program called PMView http://www.pmview.com/ will let you do most of the things the average person needs to do to a series of new photos. It also has a very powerful photo conversion system and will convert almost any format to any other format.

It’s main advantage is it’s so easy to learn that you can be productive less than five minutes after installing PMView.

Its main lack is no red eye correction and joining two photos is so complex that I’ve never managed to use it, but that’s true of every other photo editing system I’ve tried as well.

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Best Red Eye remover – go to http://www.vicman.net/ and grab the one from his list of tools. Easy to use and works great. There are two listed. Get the standalone version and not the plug-in. Or get both. They are free!

Photo Stitcher – Get Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor (ICE) from Microsoft Labs. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/

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I am not sure if it has been mentioned here, but Magix makes some wonderful media programs. A free one that is very similar to Photoshop elements is Xtreme Photo Designer.
http://www.magix.com/us/free-downloads/free-software/xtreme-photo-designer/
Harald

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Hi Tia,

I use both Photoshop & Infanview. I like Infanview for a fast display, in thumbnail or full sized, of photos that I have either on file or have acquired via disks, or camera chips, or scanner. Photoshop does have the Bridge, of course. But Infanview is a much quicker presentation of the jpeg, or tiff files which I want to view. I have not used the editing capabilites of Infanview, but they seem adequate for simple issues.

Respectfully,
Chuck

I’m looking for a free image editing program as I don’t want to buy either Adobe Photoshop or Corel PaintShop Pro (or their lighter alternatives – Adobe Photoshop elements or Corel PaintShop Express). The price is very high for all programs, no matter the company behind them. I’ve heard about these two free programs – Paint.net and Irfanview – and was wondering if anybody here actually works with one of them and can give his opinion, and also if one of them is recommended.

My main uses are cropping, making pics brighter or darker and resizing.

TIA

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I’m looking for a free image editing program as I don’t want to buy either Adobe Photoshop or Corel PaintShop Pro (or their lighter alternatives – Adobe Photoshop elements or Corel PaintShop Express). The price is very high for all programs, no matter the company behind them. I’ve heard about these two free programs – Paint.net and Irfanview – and was wondering if anybody here actually works with one of them and can give his opinion, and also if one of them is recommended.

My main uses are cropping, making pics brighter or darker and resizing.

TIA

I am not familiar with paint.net but have been a long-time user of irfanview. For what it has to offer, irfanview has worked well for me. I don’t do hard-core photo editing, but it works well for the typical photo touchups. It is great at cropping, resizing, and supports conversion from one type (.jpg) to a slew of other types (i.e. .bmp).

If you have a bunch of pictures that you want to rename or resize – it supports a batch mode where you select multiple images and then apply the changes you’ve selected to all of these images, either writing to new filenames or overwriting existing files.

Lastly it also includes a thumbnail creator – which has been very useful for me.

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Hi TIA,

I do a lot of graphics work and have used virtually all of the graphics applications mentioned in this interesting thread. I’ve found, inevitably, that the champions of any app can be very partisan. My personal recommendation is to create your own ‘Graphics Suite’ from a mix of different apps, according to complexity of task, perhaps in the following order.

Irfanview (with the separate plugins download): Set Irfan as the default image file association app (an option as you install) and your images will open like lightning. It will also quickly deal with most basic photo manipulations, including making icons. Irfan will also accept Photoshop plugins, which can turn it into quite a sophisticated tool.

PhotoScape: Has an unusual interface but the Editor functions are, for a freeware application, in a class of their own. The simplicity (and quality) of some adjustments and effects put the big name apps to shame.

PhotoFiltre: A very useful addition to the above two apps, and it sometimes produces effects neither achieve as easily. A shame it doesn’t accept Photoshop plugins.

FastStone Capture 5.3: For screen capture I highly recommend this little app, which is a dream to use. Put its shortcut in the QuickLaunch bar and it’s always available. You can still get this last freeware version from the likes of download.cnet.com by googling: FastStone Capture 5.3

For more complex work I use the later versions of both Paintshop Pro and Photoshop, but have often expressed my preference for the simplicity of Paintshop Pro, which regularly earns me a brickbat from the Photoshop evangelists! I feel the same about GIMP, which similarly adds to my incoming missile count.

If you Google around the graphics forums you will find many more useful freeware graphics applications, but here are a couple that are worth a look at:

XNview: Some will recommend replacing IrfanView with Xnview, which started out as a lightly disguised copy of Irfan but has since undergone considerable development. My partisan view is that I do not like it’s interface.

Serif PhotoPlus SE. This is the freeware ‘taster’ of Serif’s commercial graphics programs. It’s not bad for a freebie – beware that they will nag away to sell you a later version.

Picasa: Some love it but its attempts to take over the world simply drive me nuts.

Have fun!

Regards, Chris

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Thank a lot for everyone here for their excellent help.

However, Chuck and Chris Cooper – TIA is not my name LOL, it’s an acronym for Thanks In Advance.

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I get pretty darn serious about my digital photography having had a fully operational film darkroom for some 40-years! Photoshop is an amazing program even on the Windows platform, but it’s to much for a photographer who wants to perfect his/her image but not necessarily manipulate it! Besides it’s horrifically expensive! My solution is Gimp 2.6.4. This program does almost all that Photoshop can! Some highlights: If you have leaning lines in your image, or some barrel distortion on wideangle shots you can straighten these using the Perspective Tool and it is way easier to use than the one in Photoshop. The Clone Stamp helps get rid of undesirable blemishes and if used correctly can duplicate a pattern in the image, making the blemish or unwanted glint in flash photos disappear. The Healing Tool blends out a blemish and can be used as well. Particularly nice for facial blemishes on portraits. Gimp also features Levels, Curves which are essential for straightening out digital images which never seem to image perfectly on most digital cameras! I always use Levels first before proceeding to make any other adjustments. This program is almost as powerful as Photoshop and features tools as sophisticated and in some instances a little easier to use. Gimp can read/write Photoshop files albeit not perfectly, (some features found in Photoshop are not supported and are saved to a separate hidden file when working on a Photoshop image. This enables those features to be retained when once again pulled in to Photoshop). Of course Gimp has Layers capability, but it works slightly different than Photoshop in many instances. Since when I make changes to an image, I intend to make them permanent, I am extremely happy that adjustments don’t have to be made in layers and thus the original file format can be retained without having to flatten an image first. The interface and all the tools are right there on the two sidepanels and don’t require having to mount a pallete to do something like Photoshop. There are other sidepanels you can dock and also chose which pallettes you wish to have displayed on the sidepanels. Gimp has the necessary tools I need to do some serious tweeking to get the image perfect, it’s basically an electronic darkroom! The best thing about it is that it is completely free! Some of the drawbacks are that it can read, but not write a ProPhoto RGB color profile to the image. I haven’t figured out why that is yet. Gimp has no support whatsoever for Camera Raw files, so you need an additional program like Raw Therapee, (freeware), that does everything the Photoshop CS4 plug in can. You then save it to a format Gimp can read if you want to work on it in that. When installed in Windows 7 64-bitOS it installs in the X86, (32-bit) layer still but 64-bit version is coming soon with some real whiz bang features. First startup can be a problem with Win 7 64-bit too, and have had the program unexpectedly close on startup the first time only to start and find everything the second time around. You will find this program a powerful tool for your digital photography and I reccommend it highly.

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Some famous fellow once said “make everything as simple as possible (or reasonable) but no simpler”. I use many different image editing applications, including often Photoshop, and I would suggest applying that advice to this question. Since you’re concerned enough to want to make your pictures better by adjusting the brightness and cropping them, don’t you think you might want to move on to more advanced adjustments someday?

I would recommend avoiding those “simple” programs and keeping your options more open. Sure, programs like Picasa can handle very basic stuff like cropping and brightness, but even Picasa has a complicated interface that includes a lot of stuff you don’t need. (Picasa and some other “all-in-one” programs also have a nasty habit of wanting to organize your files for you. If you’re not careful the result is that you lose track of where they decide to move your files, or where the edited versions of your pictures are. They alternate between insulting your intelligence and expecting you to learn their specific paradigm for workflow. Serious editing programs operate more “manually”, and don’t usually do annoying things like that.) Irfan is great as a viewer, but not so great as an editor. It will also handle things like basic brightness, contrast, and cropping quite well – but lacks many more powerful and useful options common to more powerful programs. For example, someday you may want to remove a color tint from a photo (fix those green faces). You can do that with the tint and saturation controls found in almost all editors, but the easiest, best, and most accurate way is by using color levels – an option that is only available on more serious editing programs. You might not want to learn how to do that right now, but it would be nice if it was available when you do decide you need it. By choosing a more powerful program, even if you only use a few of its features to begin with, you will have those options available when and if you decide you need them.

I would suggest that you seriously consider GIMP. The interface may appear daunting at first, but you don’t have to learn it all at once. For the simple adjustments you do now, you can stay with Image:Crop and Colors:Balance or Colors:Auto. More importantly, however, it has those powerful options (like Colors:Levels) if and when you decide to try them. GIMP is free, and you can get it for most platforms.

[Incidentally, I use Photoshop for “serious” editing, and I would have to say that it is well worth the price if you need what it does. One thing also worth considering is that being familiar with Photoshop is a marketable skill – which counts firmly in its favor if you were considering buying an editing program. Unfortunately, Adobe has chosen to use a slightly different interface for Photoshop Elements, so it does not benefit from its association in that regard. ]

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For more complex work I use the later versions of both Paintshop Pro and Photoshop

Same here; after using both extensively for a long time, one gets to know which is good at doing what; and those things differ so both are needed, though I could get along completely without Photoshop (CS3) if PSP had Pin Light in styles, the same Exposure function and was as good at antialiasing selections.

XNview: Some will recommend replacing IrfanView with Xnview, which started out as a lightly disguised copy of Irfan but has since undergone considerable development. My partisan view is that I do not like it’s interface.

I too wasn’t so high on the UI but increased the thumbnail size, toggled out the preview strip (too wide and narrow to be effective where its located and since the thumbnails are large enough, not needed) and turned off thumbnail Icon file info display (though that might be very useful to someone else) so it wouldn’t restrict the size of the thumbnail if that info were present. So now its one of the only image programs that will tab a double-clicked image for review or comparative analysis. The first tab remains the browser so its easy to keep browsing for the next image and its very effective. I also use the Copy image data (not file) menu item a lot in the browser view which is very convenient. Irfanview can do the same things but in different ways that didn’t match my methodology as well so I ended up switching 2nd and third place as far as browsers/basic editing goes. The top spot still belongs to FastStone by an easy margin as it fits my usage almost to a T(-square?-I’ve always wondered?) and I think it does the most in the easiest way. Don’t have to go far to find a huge fan of Picasa though–that’s about all my Mom uses!

So the point once again is, I think, no one who’s been managing and editing images for a good deal of time uses just one program. The perfect do all program does not exist when it comes to image manipulation (for instance you may have 5 different programs for editing and they will all tackle red eye correction in a different way) so finding the proper mix is probably one of the most personal and important tasks to accomplish. That and the skill to manipulate images as you see them in your mind’s eye, which is why you preserve the originals even after you think you’ve reached a competent level, and like anything else, to be really good, that takes years of practice!

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Byron Tarbox

The top spot still belongs to FastStone by an easy margin as it fits my usage almost to a T(-square?-I’ve always wondered?)

Thanks for the tip, Byron – as I already commented, I’m a great fan of FastStone Capture so I must have a proper look at FastStone Viewer.

As for ‘To a T’, it appears to be a simplified form based on the Biblical word “tittle”, which refers to tiny details: ‘to a tittle’ was used to refer to precision (something that fits exactly, that is ‘to the smallest detail’).

Amazing how much you learn on a forum and – how much stuff Google knows, eh!

Cheers, Chris

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Hi rfe777,

Thanks for putting me right on my naming error – that’s the problem with you young text addicts – I’m old enough to remember when the suggestion of a free company car–phone or mobile was prime motivation to seek another job!

To return to your original comment that ‘My main uses are cropping, making pics brighter or darker and resizing’ I still think that Irfanview, or XNview with the interface set-up as per the helpful suggestions from Byron Tarbox, can simply achieve everything you need, and more.

Nevertheless, I would still suggest having a look at PhotoScape, which adds many quite sophisticated and subtle techniques, including removal of colour casts, softening of skin tones, point of focus adjustment, etc. After overcoming my initial reaction to its somewhat odd interface, I spent the next couple of hours chuckling with delight at just how quickly it can dramatically improve even a mediocre photo.

Best regards, Chris

P.S. You’ll probably be as old as me before you manage to get to grips with the GIMP – sorry guys – only joking!

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I’m looking for a free image editing program …
My main uses are cropping, making pics brighter or darker and resizing.

TIA

If you want simple image editing and tweaking, buy a Mac and use iPhoto. . I’m not a Mac fan boy but my wife recently purchased a Mac and I gotta tell ya that iPhoto is way cool. It has an incredibly simple interface and fixes pretty much any blemish you’d like to fix without layers and masks and obscure image editing lingo…point, click, fixed.

Re Gimp and it’s ‘horrid’ UI. Once you leave the simple editing systems, the apps become complex, the number of options increases exponentially, and the interface becomes more and more difficult. If you like/know Photoshop, there is a version of Gimp that mimics the UI (think it’s called photoGimp, not sure but Google is your friend).

Picasa is simple to use and free for most simple image fixing.

There’s an add-in for windows (used to be Power Tools, not sure if it’s available for all versions of Windows) that included a right click on file, resize option – very nice.

An option is Picure Resizer – it’s an exe that you drag files onto and it automagically does the resize for you; change the file name, change the size of the resultant pics. Pretty cool, offers batch file handling..

Best of luck.

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Re Gimp and it’s ‘horrid’ UI.  Once you leave the simple editing systems, the apps become complex, the number of options increases exponentially, and the interface becomes more and more difficult.  If you like/know Photoshop, there is a version of Gimp that mimics the UI (think it’s called photoGimp, not sure but Google is your friend).

GIMP’s UI is only horrid until you understand it, and in any case you can customise it to suit your needs. For instance, here is one way you can make it look, which is quite like Photoshop and quite user-friendly.

The adaptation of GIMP you are thinking of is called Gimpshop, not photGimp.

Ian

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CorelDraw GraphicsX5 is said to be comparable to Photoshop, but at a much more affordable $199.00. I’ve read it so comparable to Photoshop, that once you know the difference in terminology – example – layers in Photoshop are called objects in Corel, you can use a Photoshop book to learn it. You can buy very good Corel tutorials – text and how to video on CD [around $99.00] – from Graphics Unleashed website, and they have a 10% discount coupon for Corel, and coupon for free shipping…if you buy from a link on their site. You can also sign up to receive a free daily newsletter from Graphics Unleashed with tips & info. There is a 30 day free trial of Corel’s program at http://www.corel.com. I have CorelDraw Graphics X4 and love it, also have the Graphics Unleashed DVD.

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IrfanView has two very important things for my purposes. The first is that it will read almost all if not all relevant file types (including *.pcd, of which I have a number. That is Photo-CD, a Kodak format from a number of years ago.). The other is that it is surely the fastest thumbnail draw in the West (or anywhere else), complete with a desktop icon to let you access them even faster.

Even if your primary program is something else, it is an excellent second program to have installed for those occasions when you know you have files but the program you are using can’t read them, and for occasions when you know your catalogue fairly well but want to go through thumbnails in a hurry to find something. Yes, it does a million other things too, but it helps to be aware of the strengths of specific freeware programs, since there is nothing to require that you use only one.

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