Image Editing Recommendations

Paint Shop Pro $$

For day-to-day image editing my tool of choice is Corel's Paint Shop Pro. I've used this program for many years and origianlly chose it because it was, and still is, much more economical than Adobe's PhotoShop. It's one of a very few programs that are on my personal list of commercial programs that I won't try replacing with other products.

GIMP

"GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring." (from their website)

If I wasn't so accustomed to using Paint Shop Pro, GIMP would probably be my image manipulation program of choice. It's very powerful and open source, so it's free.

If you don't already have an image editing application of choice, then I recommend GIMP.

Irfanview

Technically, Irfanview is an image viewer. For example, it's great for viewing all the images in a folder, especially when they're a collection of different formats, e.g., JPGs, GIFs, or PNGs.

However, I find it useful when I have a large number of images that need to be resized. An example would be photos from an event that were taken as high resolution JPGs and I need smaller versions for use on a website (where the originals would download too slow).

Inkscape

"An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format." (from their website)

I find Inkscape to be a specialized tool that's particularly good at producing graphic images of text, although it does a lot more. Some are probably wondering: Why would I ever want graphic that just contains text? The simplistic answer is: "A lot of places." For example, the text in the heading on this page that says "TROUTREACH TECHNOLOGIES LLC" and "Reaching Out Through Technology" is actually an image using text in two fonts, in three sizes, and four colors, plus a transparent background. The original version is in a very high resolution (read lots of pixels wide and high). Inkscape allows this image to be converted and saved easily in any desired size as a bitmap graphic (in PNG format). Thus it works on any browser, regardless of the fonts installed on the browser's computer.

To be realistic, Inkscape's interface isn't the most intuitive to use, at least by my experience. Nevertheless, it can at least be conquered, if not mastered, with a reasonable effort.