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Best Free Software for Photographers

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Everyone likes free, right? If you’ve been around computers for a while, you know there are tens of thousands of free software programs available to download. The problem is, how do you know which are the best?

Fortunately, someone at Reddit.com compiled a list of 75 of the best-rated free software programs.

Instead of showing you all of them, below are the ones that would be of most interest to photographers and visual artists. Bookmark this list, and if you ever need a piece of software, give this list a glance before going out and spending your hard-earned money.

Image Editing Tools

Gimp is a full-featured program that does 90% of what you can do in Adobe Photoshop. Use it for image retouching and editing, free-form drawing, converting between different image formats, and more. GIMP is available for macOS, and Microsoft Windows.- https://www.gimp.org/

Krita (means Crayon in Swedish) is a graphics editor designed primarily for digital painting and animation. It features a large, uncluttered canvas, color management support, advanced brush engine, non-destructive layers and masks, group-based layer management, vector artwork support and switchable customization profiles. It runs on Microsoft Windows and macOS – https://krita.org/en/

ImageMagick is a command line image editing program. It’s not as easy to use as desktop programs, but if you need to resize hundreds of images and and convert them to jpeg, it can be done in seconds. IM can read and write images in over 200 formats including PNG, JPEG, GIF, HEIC, TIFF, DPX, EXR, WebP, Postscript, PDF, and SVG. Use ImageMagick to resize, flip, mirror, rotate, adjust image colors, apply special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves. Users claim it’s even faster than creating PhotoShop macros. It runs on Linux, Microsoft Windows, and macOS- https://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php

Paint has been around for years. Unlike Adobe Photoshop, Paint’s simplicity is one of its main selling points; it’s a quick, easy to operate free photo editor. Don’t confuse it with the old version of Paint that came with Windows – this is a real photo editor, just one that’s easier to learn and use with support for layers, filters, plugins and more. Paint works in Windows only – https://www.getpaint.net/

Image Viewers/Managers

Darktable is a virtual light table and darkroom for photographers. Similar to Adobe Lightroom, it manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable light table and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them. Very powerful with non-destructive editing, full-color management, and support for plugins. It runs on Microsoft Windows and macOS – https://www.darktable.org/

Irfanview is one of my personal favorites. It is a very small program that opens virtually any image format to full-screen instantly. I never have to wait for PhotoShop to load or squint at large thumbnails. In addition to being an image viewer, it has some basic editor, organiser and converter functions. Runs on MS Windows only – http://www.irfanview.com/

Everything is search engine that locates files and folders by filename instantly for Windows (only). Unlike Windows search, Everything initially displays every file and folder on your computer (hence the name “Everything”). You type in a search filter to limit what files and folders are displayed. Great for finding client folders if you are bad at organizing your files – https://www.voidtools.com/

Vectors, Video

DaVinci Resolve is a video editing program that competes with Adobe Premiere Pro. The folks at DaVinci claim more movies have been made using their software than any other. While professional video editing software has a steep learning curve, if you need to make a video take a look at this macOS and Windows-compatible program. – https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/

Blender is a 3D modeling suite. It supports the entire 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. If you’ve ever seen a monster animation in a movie, chances are it was created in Blender. It runs on Microsoft Windows and macOS – https://www.blender.org/

Inkscape is vector art software for illustrators and designers. Vector design is preferred for creation of logos, illustrations and art which require high scalability. It is comparable to Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw, and runs in Windows or on macOS – https://inkscape.org/en/

VLC Video Player solves the problem of trying to play a video your operating system doesn’t support. VLC plays files, discs, webcams, devices and streams in MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, MKV, WebM, WMV, MP3 and more file formats. Runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Unix, iOS, Android- https://www.videolan.org/index.html

Utilities

Google’s Document Suite (Docs, Sheets, Gmail, etc. are the best replacement for MS Office. When combined with your Google drive, you can have all your documents available instantly and anywhere on any PC or smart phone. Compatible with any OS,  ) – https://www.google.com/

Malwarebytes protects your Windows or macOS PC from Malware. Malware (malicious software) is any program or file that is harmful to a computer user. Malware includes computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses and spyware. Even if you’re running an anti-virus program, you need to protect your PCs from Malware. This software is the smallest, fastest, and the best at it – https://www.malwarebytes.com/

Windows Snipping Tool (Windows only) screen capture tool easy to use, and it comes free with Windows – https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4027213/windows-open-snipping-tool-and-take-a-screenshot

Greenshot is a light-weight screenshot software tool free for Windows ($1.99 for macOS) that lets you grab any portion of the screen and save it to your clipboard, as a jpeg file, or send to email or print. It has a few more features than the Windows Snipping Tool (above) – http://getgreenshot.org/

Click here to see the entire list.

Photo by Matan Segev on Unsplash

 

 

 


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