I have maintained a list of freeware image editors which I have posted on several forums, including this one. Albeit, all of them offered useful features, some more than others; none of them offered the functionality of a commercial product in a freeware package...until now.
MAGIX has recently released their Photo Clinic 4.5 as full freeware. This editor handles multiple file formats, does layers, takes Photoshop compatible plugins, and is capable of editing Photoshop PSD files (handy for anyone who has downloaded a free template but does not want to spend 100-600 dollars to edit the dang thing). This is for Windows and is a 10MB download.
You can download the file here.
It never fails that when I post about freeware image editors, some smart alec has to come along and try to sing the praises of GIMP. That is despite that GIMP cannot edit PSD files (layered) and does not have the plugin support that Photo Clinic has. They seem to coveniently forget to mention to would be users of GIMP that the GTK+ runtimes that you must install in order to use GIMP on a Windows machine requires that you rename two dlls. This is fine, until you have a program which requires those dlls; then you have to play the rename the dll game.
Well, there is an option for those who want to try GIMP without having to play the rename the dll game. It is called Portable GIMP and is the complete GIMP package, but in a portable executable which requires no runtimes to install, and it will run resident on your hard drive or you can run it off of a flash drive.
You can get Portable GIMP here |
