Comparing Photo Editors
Most definitely, choosing the photo editor for you is the most important choice. If you are not comfortable with the photo editor or if the photo editor does not have the desired features or options then it is important to keep looking and don't settle. There are a lot of choices for photo editors.
Decide whether an online photo editor, a free photo editor or a paid photo editor might be best suited for you. When looking for a free photo editor then try and find the best free photo editor. There are no two photo editors that are exactly alike. There are a couple that are similar to one another as seen with these tutorials.
There are photo editors that mask as free but are really only free trials.
Cyberlink offers Photo Director
While there is a free version of Photo Director, the persistent advertising to upgrade is quite annoying. Photo Director is a point and click and is not set up like other photo editors. The use of extremely technical terminology is utilized throughout this software so this wouldn't be our first pick. There will be a semi-difficult learning curve.
Movavi offers Picverse
While this software appears to be functional and nice to use, it is only premium for 30 days and then they want a subscription or a lifetime purchase. Watch out for that lifetime purchase because it does not include any new major versions. The major versions must be purchased separately.
If you read our previous tutorial, these are just a couple of examples of the tactics that are used masked as helpful software but designed to take your money instead of helping you make it.
For truly free software there are quite a few for which you may or may not be aware.
Most people have heard of some of these but probably not all of them.
GIMP
We talk about GIMP in free vs. paid photo editors so we won't go into detail on it but you can download it from https://www.gimp.org. It is kept up to date and is a nice free choice for an editor.
DarkTable
https://www.darktable.org/install/
This open source has been updated as of July 2022 and claims to be the darkroom and light table for photo editors. It works with digital negatives and keeps them organized. If you are not sure what that means, join the club because we didn't either. We downloaded this software and found it to run extremely slow on our system and while the screenshots were very promising, after a few minutes we couldn't figure out how to open an image in the software. We estimate the learning curve on this one to be a heavy learning curve.
NCH offers Photopad for free for non-commercial use
https://www.nchsoftware.com/photoeditor/download-now.html
This is very nicely designed software and it is difficult to see how they are offering this for free. We felt there must be a catch. While this software is feature-rich, it does lack a lot of advanced features such as a clone tool or a content-aware tool. We downloaded and used it and are very impressed with the features it provided. We did discover there are links to other software that offers even more features but that software needs to be purchased which makes this software not quite 100% free.
Inkscape
This is a feature-rich full open source, downloadable, cross platform free photo editor. What does all that techinese mean and why did we use it? It means there are a lot, and we mean a lot, of tools and features within this software. Further it means they have versions that can be installed directly to your computer whether it is Linux, Mac or Windows. Now, why did we use techinese instead of just explaining it in a language that can be understood? Well, that is because you will need to know techinese if you expect to use Inkscape efficiently. If you didn't understand the first sentence in this paragraph then this software may not be suited for you. This software is well maintained by developers but you can tell that it is maintained by developers because there is techinese all over this software. If you don't know your terminology, and we mean very deeply, Inkscape will be a very hectic learning curve.
If you already know your photo editing and mathematical terminology extremely well then Inkscape is a fantastic choice as it has a tremendous amount of features and the developers have done an amazing job of programming this software.
Inkscape is not well documented at the time of writing this so the best choice you have of learning this software is from the community and forums. While I have not used those options for that particular software, I have used those options for many other pieces of software and they don't turn out well so if you've not used them, I don't suggest trying.
Photopea
This is both a downloadable software for Windows and a free online photo editor for all platforms. It is amongst our list of the best free photo editors as it looks and acts like Adobe Photoshop, is well documented, and what you learn on Photoshop tutorials may apply to Photopea and what you learn in Photopea tutorials will apply to Photoshop. Half of our photo editing tutorials will be based on this software.
Adobe Photoshop
So decide what your needs and requirements are before moving forward with a photo editing software because you will be with that software a very long time.
Budgetary Constraints
Know your budgetary constraints. People in different parts of the world can afford different pieces of software. Only you know what your budget is and what you can afford or not afford. Only you know what your current bills are to know whether you can spend funds on paid software or must live with the lack of features or free open source software. Open source does not always mean better. While there is really great software out there for open source, you will find yourself searching through a myriad of useless software to find the one great piece of open source software to suit your requirements. If you are a diehard free open source fan then perhaps stick with Photopea, GIMP or Inkscape for the open source best free photo editor.
Features and Tools
The thought process here is that if you are paying for the software, it should be maintained by a team of professional programmers and the software should be feature-rich and well documented so it should be easier to know about its features and tools.
Let us discuss free software. What features are available in the free photo editor software? This question is probably the most important question to ask about the software. Not all free editors are made the same. These free software packages are typically programmed by volunteers or a single person that is usually great at programming but typically lacks any type of business background resulting in a lack of funding or resources to keep the project updated. The software may not have similar features as other paid or free photo editors that are well backed financially or may not even be compatible with the latest operating system.
Operating System Compatibility/Video Card Compatibility
This paragraph has the potential to go into a lot of techinese but we will try and keep it non-technical. Not all photo editors are created equal. Video card or video chipset features are constantly evolving allowing for more features with the operating systems and with photo and video editing software. Whether we are working with MacOS, Windows or Linux, the capabilities of the operating system to work with the latest hardware directly affect the capabilities or features of a photo editor. If a photo editor is not updated regularly or programmed to utilize the capabilities of the latest operating system or video card then this results in either lack of features or incompatibility with the latest operating system.
Operating systems tend to change how the system files interact with each other. When the updated version of an operating system is released, system file names are changed from the previous version, registry entries are changed, pathways to files are changed, programming is updated, old programming is removed and all of this may cause incompatibility with previous versions of a photo editor software.
Installed or Online Photo Editors
There are differences and pros and cons to both an online photo editor and an installed photo editor.
An online photo editor is one such as Canva that can only be accessed with Internet access. These types of photo editors are highly dependent upon several factors including:
- The overall speed of the computer. This is determined by the speed of the CPU, speed and amount of memory (RAM) and the speed of the hard drive in the computer (SSD is faster than HDD). There are other factors involved but those are the main 3 to focus upon when deciding upon the computer.
- The speed of the Internet connection for the person using the service.
- The speed of the computer upon which the online photo editor is hosted.
- The speed of the Internet connection to which the computer hosting the online photo editor is using.
Depending on the capabilities and programming of an installed photo editor, it would rely upon:
- The capabilities of the video card or video chipset within the computer.
- The amount of GPU RAM on the video card or dedicated RAM for the video chipset.
- The speed of the hard drive (SSD is faster than HDD).
- The storage capacity of the hard drive.
- The speed of the CPU (Brain of the computer. Your computer will never go faster than the brain)
- The speed and amount of the mainboard's memory (RAM).
- The operating system installed on the computer.
Real World Support
Whether we are discussing a free, paid, installed or online photo editor, is there real world support? When you are there by yourself trying to follow someone's tutorials or trying to interpret the instructions of the photo editor and having issues, where can you turn? Some of these editors allow for email only support that may take a week to return while others offer community support only. The only place to turn when there are questions is the support that comes along with the photo editor. Taking into account what type of support comes along with it is an important thing to take into account when deciding which photo editor is the correct one.
Available Training
What kind of training is available for your installed photo editor or the online photo editor? We chose Photopea for the online photo editor of choice for these tutorials because it is a free online photo editor, has a lot of documentation, lots of features and the skills learned from photopea can be directly applied to the more advanced Adobe Photoshop photo editor.
This is a point for which beginners may not think about. When teaching software to yourself, it is important to know how we will learn it. Some software is extremely technical and is not self-explanatory. Look for how to learn the software when deciding which photo editor to use.
