5 Useful, Free Graphics Apps
July 2nd, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 14 Comments
I work with so many different kinds of graphics that I’m always on the lookout for applications and utilities that can make working with them easier. In the world of freeware and open source software, you can find many good applications. Here are five examples.
Paint.net is a very popular free image and graphics editing program. Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror has raved about it before. One of its best features is that you can apply effects and filters and then undo them as many times as you like.
In response to a recent post I did, readers wrote in about Mobaphoto. I haven’t had a chance to try this yet, but from the looks of it it caters well to the image editing needs of digital photographers. It lets you make corrections to photos in batches, and more.
IrfanView, as I’ve mentioned before, is my very favorite free image editing program. It’s very fast to get in and out of, and is one of the most popular pieces of freeware out there.
No matter what kind of web worker you are, if you work with graphics, you probably frequently work with JPG images. JPG Cleaner is a slick little program for taking artifacts out of JPG images.
Screen Calipers is a handy little utility for measuring inside and outside of objects in graphics. You can access exact pixel distances, crop pictures to perfection, and more with it.
Do you have any favorite graphics tools?
14 Comments Post your own comment
Chris says: July 2nd, 2008 4:49pm
Two I use every day: FastStone Image Viewer and the GIMP.
michael says: July 2nd, 2008 5:17pm
Irfanview also does excellent batch editing. I use it constantly for batch resizing.
yanis says: July 2nd, 2008 7:26pm
The Gimp really should be in the list. There are flavours for Windows, Linux and even Mac OS X.
Arhann says: July 3rd, 2008 1:38am
I use PhotoFiltre which is great, quick, light and developped in various languages
Zia says: July 3rd, 2008 1:44am
Photo Gadget is very convenient to resize those massive jpgs.
Joe Chiappetta says: July 3rd, 2008 4:04am
I do appreciate this list and I will check some of the programs out. As mentioned earlier, the GIMP is a great program for manipulating images as well as creating them from scratch. For most people, if you have the Gimp, you don’t need to spend money on Adobe Photoshop. Another great program I use for making webcomics is ArtRage. It is also free and it is more for drawing than editing photos. The program mimics real media — the marker tool really goes on and reacts like a marker, the paint tool really looks like goopey paint. It has one of the most intuitive user interfaces of all.
Bill Roberts says: July 3rd, 2008 5:17am
+1 for GIMP. It’s excellent.
Marcin Grodzicki says: July 3rd, 2008 7:55am
IRFan is something I really miss on my Mac. Even if it was an ugly little bastard…
FireWolf says: July 4th, 2008 6:23am
Perhaps the reason GIMP wasn’t on the list is because everyone knows about it?
That doesn’t necessarily make it the greatest or best, but it certainly is a good alternative to Photoshop or even Paint Shop Pro.
Sheridan Flynn says: July 5th, 2008 7:10am
Gimp is a great free tool for the Mac & PC. I’ve been playing round with Splashup on my eeePC. It’s an online image editor. Not bad at all.
A list of really good online apps would be great!
Also a list of Firefox add-ons would be cool. Currently using Foxmarks and G Space.
SeanJA says: July 5th, 2008 9:24am
What about Phatch?
QuickTest Professional scripts says: July 5th, 2008 11:07am
I think, Irfanview is the best thing for his price :)
Mark says: July 5th, 2008 3:24pm
Phatch is new and is really great (http://photobatch.stani.be).
Ktrolle says: July 7th, 2008 8:19am
Great thread and very useful aps. Some quite cool online applications like Picnik and Splashup does a very decent job (keeping in mind they are 100% web based).
Another AMAZING site is Animoto which produces videos based on still images and music files.
Does anyone know about more sites like the animoto one?