Fave 5 is a regular, pretty self-explanatory feature on TLF where I give you a list of my five favorite items in a given category.

Our Original Test Photo

As any professional photographer could probably tell you, with a little touching up an image can go from good to great.  Software like Adobe Photoshop CS4, aka the gold standard of image editors, however, can easily set you back $699.  Even if you step down to the slightly less batshit expensive more modestly priced Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2, you’ll have to part with $299 of your hard-earned money.

For the casual photographer (and most people in general), these are no small amounts, and if you consider some of the free and cheaper alternatives that are available to you, the idea of paying hundreds of dollars is laughable, quite frankly.

It should go without saying that sometimes you get what you pay for (or don’t pay for, whatever the case may be), but if you’re only going to be doing basic editing, such as cropping, color correcting, or human gene splicing, any of the programs below will do the trick without sending your wallet into cardiac arrest.

To test these programs I decided to do a relatively simple selective coloration on a photo of a flower that I took years ago at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.  If you haven’t guessed by now, the original for this test is the opening photo on the page.  I also had a second image of a spider open to show how each program handles multiple files.  Click any of the photos for a larger screenshot.

• GIMP – Free, Windows/Mac OS X

Editing in GIMP

GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and it is widely considered to be the best free and open source alternative to Photoshop.  It does almost everything that Photoshop does, and with each stable release it gets a little bit closer to being able to replace Photoshop completely.

GIMP also features an extensive plug-in library, which ensures that pretty much anything you may need to do with your  images, you’ll be able to do it with ease.  Getting used to the GIMP interface takes some time and a lot of patience, but to help you get over the hump, GIMP offers dozens of tutorials ranging from beginner to expert on their website.  Trust me when I say that those tutorials come in handy.  Unlike the rest of these programs where I was able to do this edit with relative ease, I actually had to consult the tutorial to find what I needed in GIMP.

Also, please pay no attention to my desktop in the background.

• Paint.NET – Free, Windows Only

Editing in Paint.NET

Created in 2004 and originally intended to serve as a replacement for the prepackaged MS Paint on Windows systems, Paint.NET has evolved into a real contender in the image editing world.  Although it lacks lens correction abilities, Paint.NET offers most of the same features, plug-ins, and tutorials that are available via GIMP and Photoshop Elements, as well as boasts an active forum community to address any questions and concerns that you may have while using the software.  The interface is easy to learn and extremely user-friendly.

Paint.NET also features an ingenious method for dealing with multiple photos at once by using tabbed thumbnails as opposed to separate windows for each photo.  Picasa also does something similar to this, but as you’ll see, there are lot more differences than similarities between the two.

Of all of the software programs on this list, in the short time that I’ve spent using Paint.NET, it has already become my favorite, and for those that aren’t particularly tech-savvy, it is definitely the easiest to use.

• Picasa – Free, Windows/Mac OS X

Editing in Picasa

Oh, Google.  If they aren’t the definition of trying to be all things to all people, then I don’t know who or what is.  Surprisingly, however, Google’s venture into image editing is a modest one.  Of the five editors listed here, Picasa does the least in terms of features, but somehow still manages to be the most invasive into your computer’s files.  Rather than allowing you to simply open up a single file, before you can do anything, Picasa asks you which folders on your computer to scan for images, and unfortunately, “None” is not an option.  Once inside the program, you can tell it to remove all folders, but the whole concept is a pain.  Also, without any layer support, selection editing, noise removal, or even basic resizing, there isn’t much you can do with Picasa other than some minor touch up, such as red eye removal and cropping.

What Picasa does do well is integrates your photos with other services, such as Picasa Web Albums and Blogger for easy photo sharing with friends, family, and complete strangers.  For our edit test, I had to fake it by using one of the available effects, but in no way did it accomplish the goal that I had set out to achieve.

• Seashore – Free, Mac OS X only

Editing in Seashore

Before I started researching for this list, I had never even heard of Seashore, let alone used it before.  One of the immediate things that I noticed while using it that I did not like at all was the fact that you can’t see exactly how large a particular brush stroke is gonna to be on the actual photo until you try it out.  Most every other editor I tested allowed you to, at least, get an idea of what you were going to do before you did it, but not Seashore.  With some trial and error, however, I was finally able to do what I wanted, but I would have been finished editing much sooner if I had used any other editor.

The interface is pretty simple, and by default, as soon as you open the program up, it asks you to create a new file, which is a minor annoyance, but nothing more than that.  A little more pressing of an annoyance in my book is that there is no history window that allows you to easily go back and make changes at a specific point in an earlier version of the edited image.  In many ways, Seashore is a lot like Picasa in that its primary focus is to do the most basic of edits, and in that regard, it’s still actually a lot better than Picasa.

At 8.8 MB, Seashore is a nice, small application for any Mac user who is also looking to minimize the amount of hard drive space used.  By contrast, Photoshop Elements hogs over 280 MB, and that’s not including plug-ins, tutorials, and the other extras that come along with it.

Again, ignore the background in this one, but in case you were wondering, yes, that is the hill from The Nightmare before Christmas.

• Adobe Photoshop Elements – $99, Windows/Mac OS X

Editing in Photoshop Elements

I really didn’t want to put this one on this list, but after thinking about it for a while, I knew that I had to.  No matter what I say, there are some people out there who will only trust their image editing to a Photoshop product no matter how basic the edit may be.  It is okay, I understand.  It’s no different than the folks who only use Google for their searches or who will only eat French fries from McDonald’s, some people are just set in their ways and no one is hurt in this example, so, really, who cares?  There’s a reason that Photoshop is what other image editors aspire to be when they grow up, and even if you strip it down to just the features that us nonprofessionals need, which is exactly what Adobe has done with Elements, it’ll still be better than most of the other image editors out there.

As much as I believe in no cost and low cost photography, it’s the image editor that I use on my primary computer, but in my defense, Paint.NET is not available for my Mac.

Note: The photo used for this was edited in PSE 6, and not the most current version.  I’m too cheap to upgrade.

At a $0 price tag for the majority of these programs, I highly recommend that you spend some time with several of them and find out which you feel more comfortable using, but if you really want a recommendation, here are my two cents.  For Windows users, I can’t express enough how impressed I’ve been by Paint.NET.  I’ve now loaded it on both of the PC machines that I use, and if I ever get around to partitioning my Mac, I’ll add it to there as well.  Speaking of the Mac, if you’re not interested in shelling out the 100 bucks for PSE, GIMP has to be the editor of choice if you have even the most remote plans of ever doing a variety of different things with your images, be it now or in the future.  If you’re just keeping it simple now and forever, skip all the plug-ins and adjustment filters and go with the simple and relatively easy to use Seashore.

If none of these programs are up your alley, check out this page on Wikipedia for an entire list of image editors, both free and paid.  Surely, one of these things will work for you, but if not, I’m sure that $699 edition of Photoshop CS4 will still be waiting on you at Best Buy.

Tags: GIMP, Paint.NET, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Picasa, Seashore