Best of Breed - The Best Freeware for Windows

I’ve been looking for a good graphics viewer. FastStone Image Viewer is a very functional freeware product. It is quick to lode, easy on the resources, provides a fast and effective way to navigate through your photos, gives you a way to do some basic editing, and it provides a utility for renaming and/or resizing your photos in batch mode! You can’t ask more from an image viewer. Except… maybe they could add a way to export photos to some of the online organizations like Flicker or Photo Bucket but I’m not complaining because FastStone image viewer packs a lot of features into their viewer while keeping resources in check and ‘load time’ acceptable.

If you are not a ’shutter bug’ and don’t do much graphic editing, this one program will do everything you need. However, for those of us who like to experiment with our photos and design graphics for applications and web pages, there is a need for a more robust graphics editor and I’ve covered those requirements in a previous post. With the addition of the FastStone Image Viewer I think we’ve nailed down the best free suite of graphic image editing and I would compare it to anything on the market.

When you go to FastStone’s download page, you will notice there are 2 other products that might sound interesting to you; the Photo Resizer 2.4 and the MaxView 2.1. Both programs are components that were rolled up and used to build the Image Viewer. So all the functional abilities in those products are rolled up into the Image Viewer.

http://www.faststone.org/download.htm

This is a unique section in my freeware blog because I am listing more than one product. That is because there are certain things that each product does that I feel are necessary in a suite of ‘best of breed’ software.

Gimp is an advanced graphics editor that you can do nearly anything with but it is so customizable that it takes time to learn, time to boot up, and time to configure the tools to make them do what you want them to. Gimp is well worth spending time on and learning. Most of the time I need the capabilities of this ‘Cadillac’ but there are times when I need something more swift and agile as well.

Paint.Net is a good medium class Photo and Graphics editor. This product supports layered editing and has some of the more complicated tools bundled into functions. Paint.Net is a program that most users can sit down and master in an afternoon. The one thing it doesn’t do is cursor focused smudges, blurs, and other functions. If I am wrong about this please leave a comment pointing it out. Like most good user supported code, there are a healthy number of plugins that you should look over and consider downloading and installing.

Photofilter allows this cursor focused ability mentioned above and has been my editor of choice for many years but the company that developed it is taking their product into the fee based market. I can’t blame them, it is a product that has a lot of value. The new product is named Photofilter Studio and it will set you back about 30 bucks. However, the old version of Photofilter is still available for download. The freeware product does not support layers but it does nearly everything else including the cursor focused smudges, blends, and other functions that I mention is absent in Paint.net. They have bundled all the plugins into one and I highly recommend that you install this suite of plugins.

—–

Downloads

Photofilter

If you are new to working with Graphics programs like this, download this program first and see if it does everything you need. The only thing it doesn’t do is support layers, and that ability is in the shareware version of the product but not this freeware one. Most people don’t need layers so you might be able to get away by downloading this one application. However, don’t forget to come back if your interest in Graphics Editors grows, to download the other two, more robust, graphic editors.

http://photofiltre.free.fr/frames_en.htm

—–

Gimp

You have to download and run 2 installations for Gimp the first time you install it. Both files are on this page, one is the run-time environment, and the other is the product itself.

http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/stable.html

—–

Paint.net

Unfortunately Paint.net requires Microsoft .Net V2 or greater. You should have this installed anyway but if you don’t it isn’t a problem.  It’s a mystery to me why a graphics program needs .net…  The second url is a link where you can get their plugins.

http://www.getpaint.net/download.html

http://paintdotnet.12.forumer.com/viewforum.php?f=16