Kerkia

Background

For users who want to get serious about editing their photos and images to make them nicer, enhance them in multiple ways, or even truly generating pieces of art from raw material, the professional tool most users would use are Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. There are however multiple free alternatives that are excellent and will satisfy most users. We focus here on rather advanced editing tools and will avoid mentioning the more simple edition tools as we feel the viewers we recommend, XnView and Fastone Image Viewer, do include all of those basic functionalities already and are easy enough to use. If nevertheless you are looking for such simple tool to use you could check out Picasa from Google (http://picasa.google.com/) or Photo! Editor (http://pho.to/editor/), two tools we do not use at Kerkia but that are rather good for users with very basic needs.

Recommendation

Our main recommendation is Paint.net. This tool is very complete and we find it quite easy-to-use. It supports layers and 3D rotate/zoom, which are features you rarely see in similar tools. This tool truly allows you to edit and paint your photos and images and the rare features it does not have e.g. a smudge and a burning tool can be found as plug-ins on the paint.net forum.

Our second recommendation, a slightly simpler tool with no support for layers but pretty much all other features of Paint.net, is Photofiltre. We find this tool even easier to use than Paint.net and would like to recommend it for users who are only starting getting serious about photo and picture edition.

Finally we would like to mention Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/) and its best (in our view) modified interface, GimPhoto, which is a Photoshop-like interface (http://www.gimphoto.com/), as they represent in our view the best free solution for those out there looking for a professional use. Those tools are however a lot more complex to use and we ourselves only scratched the surface of their capabilities, and this is why we do not truly recommend them on Kerkia.

Web links

Paint.net

Web site: http://www.getpaint.net/

Download: http://www.getpaint.net/download.html

Plugins (and forum): http://paintdotnet.forumer.com/viewforum.php?f=16

Photofiltre

Web site: http://photofiltre.free.fr/frames_en.htm

Download: http://photofiltre.free.fr/frames_en.htm