PhotoDemon 7.0.1

Remember how back before 2010, Photoshop was almost a mythical program that could effortlessly change every picture to fit whatever the editor wanted? Well, we've come a very long way since then. Photoshop is no longer the mythical juggernaut it once was and photo editing has rapidly become more accessible and more user-friendly over the years. This is mostly because we've progressed in user interface design, and none show it off better than PhotoDemon.

PhotoDemon boasts an impressive amount of options. This tool lets you work with just about every picture format I'm aware of - BMP, DNG, EMF, GIF, HDR, ICO, JP2, JPEG, PCD, PCX, PDI, PIC, PNG, PSD, RAS, RAW, and SGI. Just like the ever well known Photoshop, there are layer and image manipulation tools, which anybody who's worked in graphics design know the importance of. You can crop the pictures to selection, trim empty broders, rotate or flip them, generate photos with a specific number of tiles, duplicate images, and adjust the size of the canvas.

Batch Processing is also a thing with PhotoDemon, and with more options than most of its competitors. You can fix exposure and lighting problems, rename, and convert, resize, etc. If you want to, you can even create a macro so you only need to hit one button to execute multiple custom editing actions.

There are some hitches in functionality, however. It crashed twice when I was using it, and the drag and drop function is a hit and miss half the time. Overall, however, it's free unlike Photoshop, and it's also comparable in function. I can easily recommend PhotoDemon.