Adobe Photoshop is any serious photographer or graphic designer’s application of choice but you’ll have to cough up quite a lot of bills to get it. Another solution is to use Photofiltre, a lesser known and more basic yet free and solid image editing application.

Photofiltre is a relatively small application and, unlike Photoshop, will install and launch very quickly. The interface, loaded with all the features and options, can be confusing at first glance, but after a short time,, you should be comfortable with it. The right side is composed of the shape and drawing tools and an optimizable color palette. The top bar has all the essential image editing and modification options. Photofiltre sadly doesn’t let you customize the interface and choose your favorite tools however.

Among all the image modification tools, we particularly liked the quick contrast/hue and saturation buttons because you can check out the effects and immediately and easily correct the image if you’re not satisfied with its quality. If you trust Photofiltre, you can also let it adjust these parameters automatically.

Like any self-respecting image editing application, Photofiltre includes the most widely used filters to transform your image, but if you need to make really significant changes, you’ll find yourself limited. Furthermore, unlike Photoshop, Photofiltre doesn’t include layers, making it more challenging to work on different elements of the image separately.

Like the excellent free image viewer Irfanview, Photofiltre covers the majority of image formats and can batch process and convert images rapidly. Photofiltre has five different zoom options yet we found them to be more or less similar. The magnifier is probably less precise than the drop down percentage pane, and the auto zoom adjusts the image’s size according to Photofiltre’s window size.

The image explorer is located at the bottom of the screen, and if you set it according to your image file you’ll be able to quickly preview all your pictures. However, if you work with multiple image files, it can quickly become confusing, as you’ll have to open up an explorer tree pane every time to look for your pictures.

While Photofiltre is miles away from the professional oriented Adobe Photoshop it’s an excellent free alternative. The program contains all the essential tools and options to edit and optimize pictures. It loads up very quickly and changes can be instantly previewed. Novice photographers or graphic designers can use it to cut their teeth on image editing before going on to more complex applications.

Download PhotoFiltre 6.3.1 in Softonic

Fotosizer is a freeware batch image resizer tool. It resizes your photos in just 3 easy steps - 1. Photo selection, 2. select resize settings, then 3. Start the resize!

Increasingly, sharing photos on the internet is becoming more and more popular. Photos, represented as JPEG files from digital cameras, taken at high resolutions are far too large to send over the Internet, with some photos ending up at 5 mega bytes. Uploading one photo to a photo sharing website is fine, but 10, 20, or even more, this can take forever, especially on a dial-up connection.

With Fotosizer, you can shrink JPEG image files, along with other supported formats, and dramatically reduce internet transfer times, enabling you to quickly and easily prepare your image collections to be published on the web

Download Fotosizer 1.170.269 in Softonic

Easy Thumbnails is a handy freeware utility for creating accurate thumbnail images and scaled-down/up copies from a wide range of popular picture formats. An elegant interface makes it a snap to find your images and select them for processing individually, in groups, or in whole folders, using a simple file selector and built-in image viewer. You can use slider controls to rotate images and adjust their contrast, brightness, sharpness and quality, and check out the results with a convenient built-in viewer.

Download Easy Thumbnails 2.93 in Softonic

This application is for people who love to travel and see new places. There are more then 237 panoramas from different locations around the world. Features included:

• Full-screen mode
• Worldwide map search
• Easy navigation

Download Panorama BackPacker a0.85 in Softonic

ImageConvert converts all or several images in a selected directory from one image format into another. ( BMP, PNG, JPG, GIF, ICO, TIFF, WMF ). Addtional the image resolution is changeable.

Download ImageConvert 1.5 in Softonic

Takes an input of jpegs and puts them in a neat film reel graphic. Great for webcam images and presentation. This small tool is able to choose a list of images that you have selected, and unit them all like a film tape. In this way, each photo appears like a still, and the whole image will have the style and border of a film tape. You can use this original style for presentations, web pages...

Download JpgToFilm 1.0b in Softonic

BIMP Lite is a small and simple batch processor for image files, that allows you to perform various functions on multiple images. It can be used to create thumbnail images from your pictures, add a prefix/postfix (with meta variables), rename using a sequential number, change the case of filenames, replace/remove spaces & underscores, flip or rotate images and also apply anti-aliasing, inverse, greyscale and bevel effects.

Thumbnail resizing allows you to force a specified width or height and keep the proportions, or define fixed image dimensions. Images can have text overlayed on them at any corner or side, as well as the center of the image. This text can include meta variables such as image height, width, number of colours etc. In addition, the program can also convert the file format to GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP, MIFF, TIFF, PCX or TGA. All of the actions can be performed individually, or combined. BIMP now also includes an FTP client, so you can automatically output images to a remote server via the File Transfer Protocol.

Download BIMP Lite 1.62 in Softonic

Opanda PhotoFilter includes more than 100 types of color photo filters for Kodak / Cokin / Hoya. It's easy to use, just load a picture in the soft and select a kind of color filter, just click the "Apply" button. Opanda PhotoFilter offers adjustable density and auto luminosity compensation to give a natural look and pleasant result. Opanda PhotoFilter's user interface is clean and gives a Mac OS look to Windows. You may choose between the Aqua & Panther styles.

Download Opanda PhotoFilter 1.0 in Softonic

uMark is a nifty application for marking images and photos with a copyright text, your company logo or both. Watermarking means protecting the image with a copyright notice or a logo that denotes the origin of the image/photo. Such watermark prevents people from using your images and photos without your consent. If they use it they must use it with the your mark. This is where uMark comes in handy.

It allows you to watermark multiple images in one go. You can save the settings for later use so that you don't have to start all over again every time. uMark automates the task to improve your efficiency. Anybody who shares an image or a photo on the net will find it useful. Graphic designers who need to protect their artwork, individuals who share their family photos online or companies dealing in digital image content will also find an interest in uMark.

Download uMark Lite 1.1 in Softonic

CopyRightLeft is an image manipulation program oriented toward creating Internet image files. This program will help you add a copyright bar on or under a picture. There is a batch mode to process several files at once. It can also create a list of the selected images in an HTML file.

Download CopyRightLeft 0.4 beta in Softonic

ImageXYZ v1.0.1 is a utility to watermark your copyrighted images using single or multi-line text with virtually any font installed on your system. You can specify the font properties (type, size, bold, italic, etc.) and choose the fore color and shadow color of the watermark. The brightness level of the watermark and shadow colors are adjustable as well. The watermark can be located anywhere on the image by using X and Y scrollbars.

The final image can be saved as a bitmap (.bmp), jpeg, (.jpg), tiff (.tiff) or png (.png) image or you can simply copy the image to the clipboard to be pasted into Microsoft Word or any other application capable of accepting pasted images. Image effects can be applied to the original image before and after watermarking. These effects include Rotating the image, flipping horizontally and vertically and applying Embossing, Smoothing, Sharpening, and Diffusing. The picture windows allow for panning of larger images.

Download ImageXYZ 1.0.1 in Softonic

Fast, advanced morphing program. The program can morph one picture to another or make funny effects with one picture. It allows the user to resize and crop the pictures to achieve the best results when morphing. The resulting animation can be computed and displayed real-time or it can be saved to disk.

Download SmartMorph 1.55 in Softonic

Animation software for creating morphs, warps and other effect with one or more pictures. The program allows the user to align, resize, and crop the pictures to achieve the best morphing results. The resulting animation can be computed and displayed real-time, it can be saved to disk and it can be printed for use with a Popims screen.

Download Popims Animator 2.10 in Softonic

Visualizer Photo Resize is a complete package for digital photographers and webmasters who wants to resize, improve and share photos fast and easy. With Visualizer Photo Resize you can achieve the results you want without any graphic or web experience, all you have to do is select an image folder and enter the resize ratio for your images and click Resize - it's that easy.

Download Visualizer Photo Resize 5.4 in Softonic

FastStone Photo Resizer is a free image converter/resizer intended to enable users to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermarks to images in a quick and easy batch mode. Drag-and-drop mouse operation is also well supported in the program.

Main features:

• Convert and rename images in batch mode
• Resize, crop, change color depth, apply color effects, add text and watermark.
• Rename images with sequential number
• Support folder/non-folder structure
• Load and save settings
• Mouse wheel support

Download FastStone Photo Resizer 2.4 in Softonic

Like every magician, a computer artist needs a few tricks up his sleeve. Image processing offers some excelent opportunities for conjuring up such magic. The techniques* used by Dydelf will allow you to perform some digital prestidigitation on an oridinary image and transform it into an outlined posterized graphic with artistic flair.

Download Dydelf 1.02 in Softonic

Recolored is a software application that helps you with the otherwise difficult and time consuming task of colorizing black and white photos. Based on the latest developments in computer assisted image colorization, Recolored makes it possible for anyone to achieve professional looking results.

To add color to a photo, all you have to do is add markings to the different regions of the image, indicating how it should be colorized. Then click the Colorize button and let the software do the rest.

Download Recolored 1.0.1 in Softonic

ImageWiz is a Free Windows program that can resize and add captions to your image files from a digital camera. You can also add the current Date to the captions. It has the following specifications:

• ImageWiz only works with JPG type files
• When you use the "date" caption, you can use yyyy for the year in a 4 digit format
• To remove a file from the list, just "right click" on it and select "Remove from List"

Download ImageWiz 2.2 in Softonic

Modern digital cameras take huge photos many megapixels in size - great for high quality printing, but too big to email to friends & family, & too large for displaying on web sites.

PhotoRazor solves this by making high quality copies of your photos at a smaller size - ideal for on-screen viewing. This reduces the file size making them much easier to email and share with friends and family.

Obviously you don't want to lose your large originals in the process - you'll need those for printing, so PhotoRazor saves the smaller resized copies to a separate folder, ensuring your precious original photographs are kept safe and untouched.

Download PhotoRazor 1.4 in Softonic

Image Resizer is a simple program to resize your images. It offers a certain amount of features:

• Resize (scale) by width/height or by percentage
• Multiple image resizing
• Drag and drop enabled
• Ability to greyscale images on-the-fly

Download Image Resizer 2.7 in Softonic