The many image-editing software packages out there. There are five popular commercial and free image-editing applications, ranging from free downloadable utilities to full-featured software used by professional graphic designers. There is Adobe Photoshop CS2, Corel Paint Shop Pro X, FastStone Image Viewer 4.6, GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) 2, and IrfanView 3. The Corel Paint Shop Pro X is a shareware program that delivers a complete set of photo editing tools to help you create professional-looking photos fast! By combining automatic photo fixes and precision editing controls with a revolutionary Learning Center. The FastStone Image Viewer 4.6 is a freeware program, it is an image browser, converter and editor that supports all major graphic formats including BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO, TGA and camera raw files. It has a nice array of features such as image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping, color adjustments, musical slideshow, and much more. The GNU Image Manipulation Program is a powerful and free piece of software that can handle all basic image editing tasks and much more beyond that. The fact that it's a open source and available for UNIX platforms, Mac, and Windows makes it extremely flexible.
The Paint Shop Pro has got its strengths and weaknesses. Some of the advantages include; it is price friendly, flexible, multi task functions, it has a learning center and videos, it is not a separate download and can be integrated, it allows for one to make changes on a batch of photos with ease and it also has a simplified user interface. The disadvantages of the PhotoShop Pro can be summarized as; the menu appears overcrowded and congested, the interface is a combination of the old and new giving it an outdated look, the performance is slow, it has unnecessary tools, too many options, and the animation shop is no longer functional. The FastStone Image viewer is an excellent program for working with images. It is full of feature filled and extremely easy to use. Its features range from simple to advanced, and allows you to do practically anything you need to with your images; and best of all its free for home and educational users. As far as disadvantages there are some limitations, but nothing to cause the average user any problems. The advantages of the GNU Image Manipulation Program is that it's free and it does everything a professional photographer could want. The disadvantages is that it has so many features it could take a while to find your way around.
Serious professional designers find it valuable to have freeware/software image manipulation software available to them because this software will help them with cropping, color correction, special-effects filters, and image-format conversion. Some of this software provides precise control over every aspect of an image. Publishers of both print and web materials depend heavily on the quality and accessibility of their images. Attention to the details of how an image is created,
how it is stored, who will be using or accessing it, and how, is crucial to successful digital imaging.
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