Could I ask for some advice on photo editing, please?
I need a free, easy-to-use photo editing app for my PC.
Ideally, one that has the facility to ‘auto-improve’ at the click of a button. I cannot be doing with all the complicated stuff like layers and adding watermarks.
Picassa has the sort of features I need but I don’t like the way it takes control of organising your photos!
I don’t use free ones. There are a few free ones, have tried a few at various times, some more or less as powerful as Photoshop but usually with significant learning curve.
One thing to watch out for is the ‘autoimprove’ especially in these days of AI as it is quite possible to get wrong number of legs or hairs or any key identification feature and this can go for the ‘improvement’ that operates automatically on the phone without you knowing.
It is usually best to switch off as many improvements as possible until you understand what is going on. Is it just improving the brightness/contrast and is this working over the whole image or on very micro level? How is it sharpening, is it going beyond traditional sharpening and trying to use AI to guess what the object should look like - this can be slipery slope to unhelpful artifacts from identification point of view.
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I don’t know about the easy to use, but GIMP is free.
I still use the software that came with one of my cameras - ZB module - think it must have come with my Cannon. Just checked on line - probably not available,
The other options I’ve used, no longer work for me.
I’ve just spotted the icon which turns off the ‘location auto-fill’ - thanks to whoever sorted that out.
GIMP seems to be recommended by various review sites. I might give it a go. Thanks LG.
Don’t forget to always work on a copy of your image e.g. do a ‘save as’ when you first start editing so that you can always go back to the original if something goes wrong while you are editing.
I use free everything. The very best photo handling I use is FREE software from PhotoFiltre
It is easy to use for ALL basic things, cropping, colour and tone correction, adding text, arrows, borders and even arting.
Anyone who loads it in will get a free tutorial HERE if you ask here or by email.
the menu system you see is easy
https://www.photofiltre-studio.com/pf7-en.htm
It has become a little harder to download but the on month trial version comes in quickly enough.
Version 7 is the FREE one
Thanks, Derek, I’ll have a look at that.
Nice photo!!
PS I’ve tried it and initial response is positive. (Easy to download - I just Googled PhotoFiltre 7 download.)
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I use Photoshop Elements, but only because I have had it for years. I would not recommend it as (a) it does far more than I need for photo editing these days, and (b) it is now ridiculously expensive.
GIMP seems good, but a bit unintuitive to me.
Fastone Image Viewer is also free: limited tools, but those there are seems to work well.
I use GIMP, and Paint 3D for annotations. The latter one won’t be available from early Nov and so I’m glad to know about PhotoFiltre7 and have downloaded it. I don’t get on with annotating pics with GIMP.
I’ve tried a couple of apps. The one that I feel most at home with is Photoshop Express. It’s free and very easy to use. (But I think that a lot of it is down to which app you feel most at home with. Some people will want to do more photo-editing than I do.)