Need A Free Photoshop Equivalent? Get Free Photo Editing Software

There is no doubt that Adobe Photoshop is the market leader in photo editing software and also in creating your own graphics and images. However, there is also the fact that to buy Adobe Photoshop costs a lot of money and is not affordable for some people. It may also be the case the you don’t actually use or need all of the functionality that Photoshop gives you and you actually just need most of the basic functions in order to manipulate photos and other images.

If this is the case then you may be able to make do with a similar program that has slightly less functionality. One of these types of products that are available is from Serif. They have two particularly useful free products Serif DrawPlus and Serif PhotoPlus. You can get both of these products as free versions and also you can upgrade to a fully functional program that rivals the functionality of Photoshop.

This is great photo-editing software that has been compared to Photoshop where you can adjust and improve all of your photos. You can repair damaged photos, adjust curves, colours and brightness etc and also crop and resize like you would expect with a standard photo editing software. It also has the great ‘clone’ tool which is one that I use a lot in PhotoShop.

DrawPlus is a vector drawing program where you can create logos and web graphics. I have used it often to create designs for printing on mugs and other products that I sell. It is really easy to use and has a great help system.

Both of these tools are great for the amateur who only uses the main functionality of PhotoShop and if you need further functionality at a great price then you can upgrade to the full versions of the products and this is still much cheaper than the original product.

There are also other free products in the Serif family that you can try out.

Check out Serif PhotoPlus.

Depending on how much control you want over your photos then one of the best free photo editing software tools available is Picasa from Google. You can do a lot with your pictures through picasa albeit nowhere near as much as you might be able to do with Photoshop. But for some people all you need is something basic - where you can take out red-eye, crop photos, change the colour or the contrast and also add some special effects if you want to like changing the photograph to black and white or sepia.

Check out Picasa if you want something free and useful for adding effects to your photographs.