Gimp is very good Crabman - it seems to be very similar to photoshop and it has stuff such as Polar co-ordinates - which is really useful - and which a lot of free software doesn't have. Serif is good, one of the guys who does the IHC man uses serif and creates some really good stuff. Also PhotoFiltre - which I haven't tried but again someone in the IHC uses it and manages some great manips. One of my own favourites is PhotoImpact now owned by Corel and not free but not loadsamoney!

Some people dislike the way in which The GIMP uses more than one window but I find that if you dock the layers window etc in to toolbox window you then just have one window that holds the image you are working on and the toolbox window.

You can then expand the image window to full screen and bring up the toolbox window when needed by pressing tab twice.

Hi Angela,

I don't have trouble with layers, my point was that by default The GIMP shows three windows (the toolbox, the image editing window and a window containing layers, palettes etc.) which some people find messy. However, it is possible to close the one that contains the layers and open layers as a tab in the toolbox window. Click on the "Configure this tab" icon in the toolbox and add the required tab or tabs.

Crabman - thought you might be interested in that my latest portrait http://www.myfinepix.pl/gallery/83/3472 was done mainly with Gimp.

Picasa 3 is good and easy to use crops straightens and much more when downloading it will ask if you want google as your homepage but you can decline and no Trojans or spyware on it

Found my list, so I'll stick it here for all to use.:

Artweaver is a Freeware program for painting. You can create sketches from photos and experiment with a wide range of brushes. Support of many different digital brushes e.g. chalk, charcoal, and pencils. Standard image editing tools like gradient, crop, fill and selection tools. Transparency and Layers support. Effect filters like sharpen, blur, emboss and mosaic. Support for the most common file formats like AWD (Artweaver), BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, TGA, TIFF, PNG, and PSD (no layer support).

Creating Online is an on-line image editor where all editing is done via your browser. Features include: Resize, Scale, Rotate, Flip, Crop, Add Text, Add Clipart, Color Correction, Grayscale, Colorize, Set Transparency, Optimizer, Reduce File Size, Edit Photo Dimensions, and more. Upload JPG / GIF / PNG image file formats. Images saved as JPG or PNG (including transparent PNG).

Fauxto is a new web-based image editor, still in beta testing. Firstly ... you must sign up to use the service, which means supplying an e-mail address. The sign up was quick and painless. When you go to start opening an image, a new browser window opens .. and damn if it doesn't look like a Photoshop window. Although it may *look* like Photoshop, you can't open PSD files. ... as it only supports gif, jpg, bmp, and tiff files. In any case, Fauxto allows you to save in a proprietary FXO format, which retains the source file to preserve layers, filters, text, etc. To be fair, we only played around a few minutes with the application, by creating a new file. It did seem pretty snappy, although there are no keyboard shortcuts. All in all ... it's certainly worth a look.

GIMP - the GNU Image Manipulation Program is a freely distributed program for photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages. This program offers many of the features of high priced raster apps ... for free.

ImageForge provides you with a set of tools for painting and editing images, photos or other graphics. Create and edit images, acquire pictures from your scanner, digital camera or other Twain compliant devices, apply special effect filters, produce your own photo albums and simple slide shows, and much more.

Krita is a free painting and image editing application for KOffice. Krita contains both ease-of-use and features like guided painting, and high-end features like support for 16 bit images, CMYK, L*a*b and even OpenEXR HDR images. Krita supports many managed colorspaces, like rgb, grayscale, cmyk, lab, ycbcr and lms, in 8 and 16 bits per channel. Krita can import RAW images in 8 and 16 bits per channel and load and save the usual image formats: tiff, png, jpeg. Krita has a large array of tools such as freehand, line, rectangle, ellipse, polygon, polyline, star, bezier curve, duplicate, paint-with-filters, crop, move, transform, perspective transform, contiguous fill, gradient, text, color picker, pan, zoom, perspective grid, selection paint, selection erase, rectangular select, elliptical select, polygonal select, contiguous area (magic wand), outline, magnetic selection, bezier curve select and select by similar colors. All paint tools can be used in soft brushes, hard pencil, airbrush or eraser mode.

myImager.com is a free on-line image editor. Upload or call images from anywhere on the web, and edit them freely with dozens of tools and filters.

Orange Photo Editor is a free program that allows you to view, manage, and publish photos on your website. It also creates thumbnails, resizes photos, and generates HTML pages.

Paint.NET is free image editing and photo manipulation software designed for Windows. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.

Phixr is a free on-line image editor that supports Picasa, Photobucket, fotolog.com, buzznet.com, fotopic.net, dropshots.com, and more.

Photobie is a free .. easy to use image editing tool for amateurs. Although not a perfect tool for professionals, it does contain many handy tools to achieve a simple task quickly.

PhotoFiltre allows you to do simple or advanced adjustments to an image, and apply a vast range of filters. It is simple and intuitive to use, and has an easy learning curve. You'll find the standard adjustment functions (brightness, contrast, saturation, gamma correction) and also artistic filters (watercolor, pastels, Indian ink, pointillism, puzzle effect). There are more than 100 filters are included.

PhotoPlus enables you to fix and enhance photographs, bitmap graphics and create web animations. Adjust brightness and contrast, color balance, remove red eye and make numerous other image adjustments and enhancements.

Picasa lets you crop, edit, organize & more. Instantly locates and organizes all the pictures on your computer. Picasa organizes your entire collection while you watch, scanning the images on your computer and automatically sorting them by date. Use the "Albums" collection to tag your photos into quick groupings inside Picasa. Viewing and sharing the pictures you grouped under an album is easy ... they make great slideshows and movies or you can email them to friends. You can also add passwords to any of your Picasa collections. You can also This FREE software pack includes Picasa.

Picnik allows you to quickly edit all your online photos from one place. It's an easy way on the Web to fix underexposed photos, remove red-eye, or apply effects to your photos. Also features: One-click photo fixing or in-depth tweaking, crop, rotate, and resize in real-time, special effects, works directly with many photo sharing sites, requires no download or anything to install.

Picture2Life.com is an easy to use online image editor that's good for editing pictures that are already online .. such as: MySpace, Flickr, Hi5, Photobucket, and more. You can crop, rotate, adjust brightness, grayscale, adjust sharpness, smoothen, guassian blur, add drop shadows, adjust contrast, watermark, add sepia tone, modify hue, add text, and more.

Pixenate is online photo editing software that allows you to crop, rotate, remove red eye, resize, zoom, enhance and more.

Pixia The original Japanese Edition was created and developed by the author, Isao Maruoka, but has also been aggressively raised by its fans, which makes this software to be quite unique and different from other tools. The program features vector and bitmap based drawing tools, masking, custom brush tips, multiple layers, color, tone, multiple undo/redo, lighting adjustments and more. It's also available in many languages.

WebPlus offers an easy to use desktop publishing style interface, and automated web site templates.

Preloadr is a free service providing image manipulation functions linked with your Flickr account. It is designed to pre-process photos uploaded to Flickr. The service offers professional tools to optimize your photos for free. Use Graduation Curve, Histogram, Layers and more.

pixer.us allows you to edit your photos online using only your browser. All modifications are done in a non-destructive way .. so your image will always retain it's original quality.

Tux Paint is a free drawing program for children ages 3 to 12 (preschool and K-6). It combines an easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who guides children as they use the program. Kids are presented with a blank canvas and a variety of drawing tools to help them be creative.

Ultimate Paint Standard LE is a full-featured 32-bit Windows graphics program for image creation, viewing and manipulation. In this freeware version, if you choose to use Adobe compatible plugins, or one of these advanced image filters (that are clearly distinguished from the free ones) the program warns you and you cannot save the image you applied the filter on.

VCW VicMan's Photo Editor is a versatile image editor with an intuitive interface and a wide variety of features. The app is user friendly, offering simple image editing, high productivity and easy customization.

Wiredness

is an on-line image manipulation system that includes a simple API, which allows other web applications to pass through the information for an image. This will allow the user to modify that image using the Wiredness system and then save that image back to the calling web application. They can also chose to cancel the modification at any time and it will return them to your site with the original unmodified image.

Nice one Chris.....a great in depth answer which it is good of you to share. Should save people a lot of time trawling the net for this type of question.

Don't think you can use photoshop brushes with elements 5 Matt - seem to remember someone on MyFuji not being able to load brushes for fairy wings.

Dave - I think Chris Hodgson mentioned Picassa some time back - but I think the latest version has a lot of really good effects in it.

Chris....... wow! Lots to look into there. Many thanks.

I personally use Adobe Elements which is not free of course, but for the level of work I do gives me more than enough to deal with. And as already mentioned here by Matt, you can pick up one of the older versions very inexpensively.

As above, there are plenty of free suites to try, but if you are serious, I would recommend Elements (around £70), which is a lot cheaper than Photoshop CS4 (around £500) and features much of the same functionality (obviously more basic) and fulfils many requirements for the keen amateur.

If you have a camera that shoots in RAW format, you can also download the Adobe RAW plugin for free. Finepix viewer only converts to TIFF's but RAW converter has huge functionality for enhancing and adjusting RAW's before you even open them into Elements or Photoshop. If you have RAW and have never used it, it is worth researching the benefits.

I bought Gimp on a cd-rom off fleaybay (yes I know it's free to download, but I can't download software at work) for a few quid. It is more that adequate for my simple needs, and the more I use it the more fun I get from it.

This is a simple layer job, I've also been able to touch up some damaged photographs for my mother after scanning them.

Thanks to Chris for the list of freeware program.