Free Photo Software
Here are links to various free software packages which may be of interest to photographers:
- • Mutifunction Optical Calculator [BobAtkins.com]
- Calculates depth of field, hyperfocal distance, magnification and various theoretical parameters such as spot size and resolution
- • Optical Blur Calculator [BobAtkins.com]
- Similar to the multifunction optical calculator, but this one also calculates just how blurred an object will be at given distances from the focal point, which can be usueful for estimating how much background blur a particular lens at a particular aperture shot at a particular distance will give.
- • Picasa
- This used to be a commercial image organizer until Google bought the package from the developer and released it for free. It will automatically catalog images on your PC, creating thumnails and allowing you to add labels (so, for example, it will show you all images you've tagged with the label "dogs"). Images can have multiple labels. Picassa also has some image editing functions as well as being integrated with services like Blogger and Hello and a host of online photofinishers. Worth a look.
- • IrfanView [Irfanview.com]
- No, it's not for fans of IR photography, "Irfan" is the first name of the developer, Irfan Skiljan. IrfanView is, in it's author's words "...a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista". In fact it's more than an image viewer, it's also an image format converter with basic editing functions, an EXIF viewer, a slideshow maker and more. It's free, but the author accepts donations.
- • Photoscape [Photoscape.org]
- Free image editor, supports many image formats inclding JPEG, anuimated GIF and RAW. Includes an image viewer, editor (with batch mode), file renaming, resizing and a number of other basic editing and graphic features.
- • GIMP [gimp.org]
- A freeware image editor. Lots of features but it's freeware originally developed in 1996 for UNIX systems and sometimes that shows. Now available for multiple operating systems including Windows. Not to everyone's taste, but the price is right!
- • PhotoFilre
- Freeware image editor developed in France (but an English version is available). Pretty good for basic image eding tasks, and again the price it right since it's free.
- • VSO Image Resizer
- Simple but effective free utility for changing image size. You can also change image format, move images and rename images, including batch processing for processing a large number of images at the same time