?Best FREE photo editing software?

[DragonsEye]

So I've used Picassa and it is fine for very very basic editing. I don't do anything close to enough to justify spending $ on something like Photoshop. I used to have Olympus Photo editing software (think it was version 2) that a friend let me have because she did use Photoshop. The Olympus pretty much did everything I personally wanted ... one of the main things being able to tweak red, green, or blue color balance. Also it was an incredibly stupid simple program to utilize so no steep learning curve at all. Well that pc died and so with it all the programs I had on it. Which leads me to my title Q: What is the best free photo editing software you have found?

 

[Shadowtski]

So I've used Picassa and it is fine for very very basic editing. I don't do anything close to enough to justify spending $ on something like Photoshop. I used to have Olympus Photo editing software (think it was version 2) that a friend let me have because she did use Photoshop. The Olympus pretty much did everything I personally wanted ... one of the main things being able to tweak red, green, or blue color balance. Also it was an incredibly stupid simple program to utilize so no steep learning curve at all. Well that pc died and so with it all the programs I had on it. Which leads me to my title Q: What is the best free photo editing software you have found?

I'm a big fan of GIMP, Gnu Image Manipulation Program. It's almost as powerful as Adobe Photoshop.

Best of all, it's Open Source and FREE!

You can find the download page here: https://www.gimp.org/downloads/

Good growing,
Mike

 

[nimbulan]

I've started using DigiKam for photo organization, but it supports editing as well. It's probably worth a look. https://www.digikam.org/

 

[hcarlton]

ImageJ is pretty easy and free, with several optional additions (most also free).

 

[elgecko]

Another vote for Gimp.

 

[Not a Number]

For basic editing Faststone and Irfanview are good choices. Both will handle most camera RAW formats but you need the plug-ins kit for Irfanview for some of the camera brands.

http://www.faststone.org/index.htm
http://www.irfanview.com/

If you need more heavy duty processing of RAW files Raw Therapee is the way to go. Not the friendliest interface but not to bad either.:
http://rawtherapee.com/