Zoner Photo Studio gets our award for top free graphics editing software!
Zoner opens to display a media manager, from which you can easily switch to the editor. Crop tool works nice, with the area outside the crop lines darkened out. Plenty of resize opitions with sharpening. Auto quick fix button to improve contrast and colour balance also works well.
Zoner gets our best graphics software award because we love the easy good looking interface, the stable build and because it focuses on the most useful and common photo editing tasks. Visit their website here.
Creating Graphics for Your Website
We often get asked to recommend graphics software, here are a few recommendations.
- don’t bother with expensive high end packages unless you really want to get serious,
- free, reliable and easy to use software is available from places like www.download.com,
- it’s worth putting in a few hours to learn some basic tasks,
- add photo processing into your schedule, do it once a week for 30 minutes,
- adding photos and images to your website regularly is easy and helps to keep it updated,
- remember to use alt tags when adding images to your website,
- using a content management system to upload images makes things easy, we can help with that if you don’t have one.
Our aim was to review and score the graphics software based on:
- ease of use
- intuitive interface
- the number of clicks required to perform the task
- quality of results
Need help with creating quality graphics? Contact us to discuss your requirements.
Top Five Free Graphics Photo Editing Software
1. Zoner Photo Studio
The winner, see our review above.
2. PicPick
Easy installation and really easy to use. Simple, attractive and clear tools along the top include zoom, select, effects, colour palette, painting and drawing.
Scrolling capture option that lets users capture Web pages and other scrolling documents all in one image.
3. PhotoScape
A tiny 16mb download, PhotoScape provides all the features you need to edit digital photos and it’s really easy to use.
The photo editing interface has a retractable file tree and viewer, easy to find and select the photo you want to edit. Once selected, editing tools are along the bottom, clearly marked and easy to use.
4. Fly Free Photo Editing and Viewer
Easy to use with a full list of commonly used tools on the left hand side including crop, resize, brightness and contrast, but no auto adjust. Clunky interface.
5. The Gimp
The Gimp, strange name but this free open source graphics has high end features with interface similar in style to Adobe Photoshop.
Other Graphics Software we Tested
Also tested but didnt’ make the top five were Paint.Net, virtualStudio, Photo Perfect Express, Photobie, Pixia and Image Tuner.
The Graphics Test we Ran
1. Open large jpg image from the desktop. 2. Crop and resize to a width of 400 pixels. 3. Adjust image quality (sharpness, contrast, colour balance etc.) 4. Save As or Export.
Where to Get Free Software
We can recommend download.cnet.com as a good source for free software.
