Here are our picks for the best free image editors.
What is your preference?
4 Likes
I rarely need to use a photo editor to enhance taken photos…we have a reasonably good camera (recommended by Choice) and it takes photos with realistic colour in any light (see photo below as an example). The only thing we do use an editor from time to time is cropping or file resizing (making smaller file size for emailing etc) and generaly use the editors packaged with the device operating system we are using (Windows, Andriod etc).
4 Likes
I use Luminar 3, and the MacPhun Creative Kit which can be standalone or used as plugins for the free Photos which comes with MacOS. The last iteration of Photos brings a great deal of what was once included with the expensive Aperture (which was comparable to Lightroom in its time). However, these are paid apps. There are free trials for Luminar and its companion AuroraHDR, but not for the Creative Kit, IIRC.
IN mentioning Darktable, its also worth mentioning RawTherapee and Digikam both of which were also originally developed on Linux but which are both now available for MacOS and Windows.
3 Likes
Another free and fairly full featured photo/image editor is paint dot net (https://www.getpaint.net/). Had to get rid of the name with the dot in it as it redirects to a painters page as it takes it as a hyperlink. It also has plugins freely avilable to extend the useful features or to enable some effects that some particularly want. For an indexed list of available plugins https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/15260-plugin-index/
They reference it in the article as novice tool but it has lots of more complex features.
I prefer to use this one and as it supports layers makes my image editing very easy to cope with. Gimp is also very good as well.
3 Likes
Inkscape is available for Linux.
2 Likes
I’ve use GIMP for many years, and am quite happy with it. Generally used for cropping, scaling, colour balance, histogram adjustment and a little sharpening.
2 Likes
I also use for stamping captions on the photo itself, where that is appropriate; and for making a collage of two or more photos. Occasionally I might convert from one image format to another.
Edit: Also rotate images by multiples of 90 degrees, frequently! Occasionally left-right reverse an image.
I use GIMP. You can do a zillion other things, about 0.1% of which I know how to do. 
4 Likes
I use MS Paint for that. Everything else has too many options.
And every time I hear that name I think of people clicking to load the program while saying “Bring out the gimp!” (Pulp Fiction reference.)
4 Likes
One thing I’ll mention regarding paint.net (that’s not the url by the way) is that they do a bundle of community plug-ins that install with a click and offer a bunch of extra image adjustments.
3 Likes
Plus 1 for paint dot net.
It started life 15 years ago as a computer science student project mentored by Microsoft and has since been maintained by the original author and other contributors. I like it because it does everything I need and the interface isn’t cluttered with scores of niche features that would only be of use to professionals.
2 Likes
