When you’re on a budget or you’d just rather buy a plane ticket to a scenic place for photography, you should check out what you can get for free.
The last thing you want to spend a lot of money on is post production software. If you can use free tools to achieve the same results, why not use them? This article will show you 5 examples.
Free software. In the past, this phrase to many of us suggested, poor quality, clunky and inefficient. Time have changed however and in the photographic world there is a veritable abundance of excellent, powerful software for the princely sum of zero. Not only are there editing programs, but also fully featured image management software. Today we are going to take a look at five of the best programs that you cannot buy.
GIMP – http://www.gimp.org
If there was ever a program that typified my opening paragraph it is GIMP. Standing for GNU Image Manipulation Program, the early incarnations of it were hard to fathom, unintuitive and limited in scope. From its very beginnings it has loosely based itself as a Photoshop alternative and today it truly is. Some of its more powerful and recent additions include: Layers and Channels, unlimited undos, as well as the full arsenal of photographer’s tools such as brushes, cloning and a range of filters to rival Photoshop. In the last couple of years, the remaining bugbear, it’s interface has received a major overhaul, making it a real rival to its payware equivalent.
Paint.Net – http://www.getpaint.net/index.html
Although a Windows only program, this excellent free app should not be confused with it’s Microsoft namesake. Like GIMP, Paint is a fully featured, powerful editing program that can be used as an alternative to Photoshop. Again, pro level features such as layers and clone tools are included. The interface is a little dated, perhaps not as good as Gimp but it is certainly usable and features a similar layout and icons to Photoshop.
See 3 more free tools over at Light Stalking.
Source: Light Stalking
