The best FREE photo editor that you can find - meet GIMP!
GIMP, an open source version of Photoshop, is an image manipulation program used for image authoring, image composition and photo retouching. Unlike Photoshop, GIMP can work like an online batch processor, a converter, as well as a simple paint program with pictures.
A group of students from the university of Berkeley California, who wanted to write an image manipulation program rather than write a compiler in scheme, developed this program. With the help of their professor, Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball worked on the program for nearly 10 months before they released it for the first time.
Its first release, version 0.54, had plug-ins that allowed other people to develop separate GIMP programs, without tampering with the main distribution. By this time, GIMP had people claiming that it was cooler and more stable than Photoshop, even though it had some problems with a few plug-ins at the time.
Advantages of Photo Editor
Being an open source program, it is available for immediate access on GIMP's download page, free of charge. This program is compatible with almost all operating systems, including Mac OS, Linux, Windows XP and Vista, Free BSD and San Opensolaris.
Even though GIMP only allows you to manipulate images, and does not include tools for drawing shapes, triangles and squares, it enables users to change the color and paint these shapes on the image.
Every feature on GIMP comes with a tutorial to help users manipulate pictures within the free photo editor. The tutorials are in three phases; for beginner, intermediate and expert users, and they have systematic instructions to help you achieve nearly any desired enhancement for your pictures.