Free and free software to edit image and photography
Thanks to free software, anyone can benefit from applications and tools that would otherwise only be available by paying expensive licenses.
Although the concept of paid software and free software has faded a lot thanks to subscription model that started Netflix and popularized Spotify, there are still paid programs or applications and others that are free to use. Download and use without going through the box.
And inside the free software, which is not always free but mostly is, we find real gems with which to create documents, edit video or audio and fix your images with the same solvency as paid solutions. Besides being free, they are maintained, improved and updated by disinterested developers.
In the case of photography and digital image editing, there are many applications that we find. Especially on mobile devices, thanks to the popularity of Facebook either Instagram. But focusing on computers, there are also free proposals to fix and improve your photos. Next, we review the most outstanding. Some will ring a bell.
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GIMP
Few introductions needed at this point GIMPone of the first free software projects dedicated to photography and that is still one of the most outstanding.
With GIMP you can do drawing, illustration, photography, retouching and editing, etc. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux for free. It has all the tools of programs such as the referent Photoshop: layers, brushes, plugin enhancements, effects and filters, color palettes, automatic erasing, manual and automatic selection, etc.
dark table
But while GIMP is the most popular, over the years the competition has grown. dark table is another free software project focused on editing photography, obtaining metadata information, making color changes, applying filters, switching between formats…
Although it is a feature-packed tool, darktable is not as complicated to use as it may seem. You can use it simply for small tweaks, such as changing contrast, brightness and saturation or remove the borders. It is also useful for more advanced tasks such as tweaking levels and curves or make corrections through its many specialized modules.
dark table It has versions for both Windows and Mac as well as for the most popular Linux distributions.
digiKam
Similar to above, digiKam is another batch or individual photo editing and retouching software, a kind of digital photography room to make changes and improvements in seconds.
In addition to obtaining metadata and renaming images or changing their format, digiKam allows you to export your photos to different online services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Pinterest or Google Photos, tag photos with scores or colors, geolocate images on a map, reduce the noise, alter brightness or saturation, etc.
you can download for free digiKam for both Windows and Mac and Linux in different versions and architectures.
nomads
If you are looking for an image viewer with editing functions, nomads is an app for Windows, Mac, and Linux that will help you view photo collections, organize them into folders, tag them, and make changes.
Among other things, you can alter the exposure, brightness, saturation, apply color filters, retouch several images at the same time, see the metadata of the photos, etc.
With nomads You’ll also be able to geolocate your photos on the map, crop the edges, change their size and format, and even rotate them if they’re crooked.
photive
And if your thing is creative photography, with photive you’re going to get tired of applying filters and touch-ups with which to alter the appearance of your images and give them a artistic touch with little effort.
Available for Windows, Mac and Linux, you can work with RAW images and in more common formats such as JPEG, BMP, TIFF either PNG. Thanks to its own and external algorithms and tools, it can be used for all types of changes. you can imitate the hdr effect, apply color changes, digitally alter the exposure and much more. Will not disappoint you.