Photography Software - What's good for basic tasks, what's free? How do I do......

I'm looking to add simple text to images, flip them, add blocks of colours picked from within the image. Nothing too complex.

MS Paint doesn't seem to have quite enough options, I've downloaded GIMP2 which has waaay more options then I'm ever likely to need. Is there anything somewhere inbetween?

Photoshop CC Free trail

Flickr has aviary which has some good features

I use Picmonkey for all my pics. I pay £3 a month for the full version.

So, messing around for an album cover. Tried Aviary and Picmonkey. Both are really simple and quick. Which is what i need.
Something that can import text would be good, although there is always ctrl-c, ctrl-v. thanks for the suggestions.

Aviary is alright but it can get a bit slow and is a pain if you want to edit multiple photos

Paint.net

How do we feel about discussion of pirated software on here?

Pshop cs2 is free or was from adobe and will do everything you need . All legit.

GIMP? maybe too steep a learning curve for your needs but it's good and there's lots of tutorials

I'm using Polarr on my chromebook and is nice for cropping / straightening etc.
Also has some basic filter overlays (more if you pay for pro version)

thanks for the replies, ive been using a mixture of ms paint (to flip an image on the vertical axis) and GIMP for everyting else. GIMP is daunting but getting the hang of it now.

one issue: I am adding text as a new layer from a .txt file, i assumed that i could then change the text and the layer would update. seems this is not the case.

this site is a bit of fun - adds glitches to pictures

http://sailorhg.com/glitchy/

glitched, and original

with files

2 Attachments

Cool!

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Adobe-Photoshop-Lightroom-4-For-Windows-Mac-New-Full-version-/272435253013?hash=item3f6e680f15:g:abMAAOSw44BYGb63

This is highly likely to be a rip off and not work, right?

Worth a punt anyway?

Edit: Well, we're gonna see.

Just received a download link and activation key so will see if it works when I get home.

It works. And opening up Lightroom really shows how much my new pc blazes.

Think I have mentioned this in the digital photo thread: Affinity Photo
It's out now for mac, and there's a (free!) beta version for Windows. Will check this out this weekend..

everyone tells me to use lightroom. but i'm not a fan of paid-for software, i greatly prefer "free software" (run linux, etc on all my computers). so, i discovered darktable: https://www.darktable.org/

this seems to have similar features to lightroom, but is free. it works well with my camera (nikon d750).

Use GIMP! There's plenty of tutorials online, and I find it almost as good as photoshop. It's probably your best option

this is great, thank you!

reminds me a bit of the old version iPhoto (histogram/levels and sliders for everything) before the messed all that up on the latest version.

Affinity Photo

Checked this out in the meantime.
Quite like a few things about it, but will keep using Photoshop as it's simply redering faster on my machine.
Worth taking a look at though!

I have Photoshop but still use Picasa for quick and easy stuff which is free, plus it collates all your photos and you can locate them on your disc easier.

Edit looks like it is changing to Google photos?? https://picasa.google.co.uk/

I'd like to be able to add a layer of simpe text to an image, that is held in a .txt/.csv, but I want it to be dynamic so when I change the text and open the image it refreshes the text....

I can get GIMP to import the text but not dynamically.

Any suggestions?