Photo Editing is something I've always used purchased products for - not because there aren't great free alternatives; I'm simply used to the work flow in Photoshop, which is an invaluable time savings I find worth the price. As part of the annual reader survey, reader's selected some of their favorite free apps, all of which provide great features and in some cases rival Photoshop in ability. Unless you're like me and simply want the familiar shortcuts and layout of your favorite pay product, there's really almost no reason to purchase an image editor when you could opt for one of these awesome free choices instead.
Reader's Choice: GIMP is quite possibly the most powerful free image editor available. It's also extremely popular with 38% of reader's choosing GIMP as their favorite. GIMP works great for simple things like batch resize a bunch of photos, covert a color photo to black and white, or even cropping one image file. GIMP excels at color correction, multi-layer image creation, and custom scripting for complex batch edits. If you want an image editor that can take whatever you throw at it, GIMP is a solid choice.
2) Paint.NET has grown into an excellent free image editor, starting with humble origins as a minor improvement to the Paint app bundled with Windows. 23% of reader's selected Paint.NET as their favorite free photo editing software. With support for layers, easy access to common functions like red-eye removal, and virtually unlimited undos, Paint.NET is generally easier for novices to use than the GIMP.
3) Picasa placed third in polling for best free photo editor, with 12% of votes, despite being more an organization tool that happens to have editing features. This could be because the app did a great job of integrating the most popular editing features into the best desktop organization tool for Windows, making most other tools unnecessary. Basic editing functions included are crop, red eye removal, contrast and color correction, and enhancement. Recently updated RAW support makes Picasa a solid tool even for pros.
4) IrFanView received 4% of reader votes. As one of the first free image editors, IrFanView remains among the most frequently revised tools in this category, routinely adding new editing features to both the graphical interface and command line options.
6% of readers selected some version of Photoshop as their favorite image editor, but since the Adobe products are commercial and not free, I've excluded them here. In some cases it is possible to get a legitimate free version of Photoshop bundled with other products, but even then a price was paid in acquisition. The remainder of readers votes were spread across 63 different applications.
