There are many times that you’ll need to use a decent graphical editor in order to manipulate graphics. It could be needed for touching up screenshots for demos or documentation, a Powerpoint presentation, graphics for a web site, or even covering up that ugly pimple or whitening those yellow teeth on your favourite self portrait shot.

You will quickly find that the paint program which is built into all Microsoft operating systems (mspaint.exe) is almost useless. To do even basic manipulation requires something more advanced.

If you want an excellent graphical editor, you could go for Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0, but that would set you back US$70 for every installation.

I’ve come across a great freeware alternative that does almost everything I need a graphics program to do. It’s a program called Paint.Net. You’ll find that using the program is quite intuitive, but it also has a decent level of built-in help information, as well as online tutorials (via a forum). Paint.Net is only a 5MB download, will do almost everything you need, and the price is right.

Another powerful freeware alternative is GIMP for Windows. GIMP is a multi-platform graphical editor, with many advanced features (truely rivaling Photoshop), and has an active online community supporting it. If you are a more serious graphics designer, then GIMP is likely a better fit for you. Although I would suggest that you might want to consider using Paint.Net for most of your manipulations and GIMP for the more complex work.

Give both of these a go, and let me know your feedback in the comments section below.

(Here are 46 other good freeware utilities)

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Categories: Digital photography, tools

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