Home > Web graphics

Free graphic editors

Most serious web designers and graphic artists would use Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8, Adobe Illustrator CS2 or Adobe Photoshop CS2. These programs are costly.

Xara graphic programs are also becoming more popular and are cheaper than the ones above.

To get around that, here is what I hope is one of the most extensive lists of free resources for graphic manipulation that you will find on the net. At the time of viewing the links work, and all are freeware but some will not be free by the time you look at them. We make every effort to keep the page updated to only include free software with no hidden costs. I have not included shareware or 30 day trials

Active Pixels 3 Version 2 developed in the end of 2006 includes tools for working with selections, layers, effects, gradients, brushes. It also includes web-safe options. Supports more than 100 graphics formats. NEW

Irfanview - the best free graphic viewer

The GIMP The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is suitable for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Supported SVG features include shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, patterns, and grouping. Inkscape also supports Creative Commons meta-data, node editing, layers, complex path operations, bitmap tracing, text-on-path, flowed text, direct XML editing, and more. It imports formats such as JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and others and exports PNG as well as multiple vector-based formats. NEW

20/20 is an image viewer, capture and annotation application. It is also capable of creating slide shows and generating thumbnails.

Brush Strokes Image Editor 1.01: You can edit images fom a variety of formats (GIF, JPEG, BMP, PNG, TIFF, PCX, BMP, TARGA, AVI); create images for websites; create and view GIF animations; adjust colours in photos; apply filters, rotations and transformations; use magic wand selections; use any picture as a brush or fill pattern; blur images; sharpen images; use frames from videos; capture frames from video cameras... and much more

 

CoffeeCup Free Image Viewer is a fast, powerful, and easy to use Image viewer and more. It has built in Email, FTP, and Zip functions that allows you to select a group of images and Email them to a friend, Upload them to your website, or create a Zip file, all from within the program. You can also browse images by folder, find images on your computer, view 35 image types by right-clicking in Windows Explorer, and make Thumbnail Web pages from any group of images, all with just one click !

Harry's Filters 2.0 lets you choose the appropriate effect without hassling through different menus and dialogs. The main effect categories are called Color, Artistic, Gradients, Patterns, Warp, Noise, En/Decrypt and Other. They include filters for changing the image color or mood, for creating artistic effects, producing colorful gradients or impressive patterns, warping images, adding special noise effects to images, encrypting and decrypting images with 64 bit keys and producing various other effects like zoom, mirror or paint effects. Compatible with a wide variety of graphic editors

HeliosPaint is a freeware paint program for creating and editing images and drawings. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Unix

IconArt is a highly-compact cursor & icon creator. Icons are used to illustrate programs and files. One example are the shortcuts on your desktop. NEW

IconArt allows you to either draw the whole image from scratch using all common tools or to import an image to turn into a icon or cursor.

Image Analyzer 1.25

Advanced image editing, enhancement and analysis software. The program contains both most image enhancement features found in conventional image editors plus a number of advanced features not even available in professional photo suites.

Image guider - Browse the folders with preview thumbnails of the images;
- Display full image information;
- View the images full screen;
- Support drag&drop for image copying;
- Delete, cut and paste images;
- Open HTML files with images to view the list of images that are linked to this file;
- Preview multiple images in many formats: JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF and others;
- Designed as multithread application. You should not wait until all images read and can work with required image immediately when it appears.
- Setup different options for image preview.

Image enhance : support for bitmap and JPEG images, webcams, digital cameras and scanners. You can digitally enhance your images by applying different filters and effects, like sharpness, contrast, grayscale, invert, logaritmize, find edges, old photo and more. You can also design your own filters.

Image Forge : image editing with paint, scan, AVI animator, image Library album-maker, etc. --FEATURES: Clipart brushes; Soft brushes; Smudge and Scatter; Special Effect Filters; Scanner / TWAIN device support and more.

Image Viewer : Browse images with ease and simplicity. Scroll down. Lots of other programs here, some free, some not.

FastStone Image Viewer NEW

- Convert major formats (inc. PSD).
- Lossless JPEG rotation.
- Magnifier viewing.
- EXIF support.
- Resizing, flipping, rotating, cropping, colour adjusting tools.
- Crop with aspect ratio confinement.
- Compare images side by side.
- Batch image converter/resizer.
- Supports animated GIF and multipage TIFF

Formati 11 is a (batch) graphics file converter; load formats: bmp, gif, jpg, png, wmf, emf, ico, icl, bmp, tga, tif, pcx, pcd, psd, psp, ppm, sgi, cut and eps; save formats: bmp, gif, jpg, png, tif, tga, ico and icl. Features: 34 effects including buttonize and seamless; Shape and Text tool; Twain scan; GIF and JPG optimizer; overlays; screen capture; smart resize; turn; PNG alpha support (mask based variable transparency); adjustable blending of two images; scriptable drawing wizards (HTML+javascript)

Merge: MERGE is a graphic utility for overlaying two images in any relative position prior to saving the result to a file. You can merge the two images in many different ways. There is an option to fade out one image and fade in the other image towards the edge of the final picture.

MxTools lite : Freeware picture manager

MyViewPad 2.0.1 (2.6 MB)uses the best digital graphics engine available. It reads about 80 image formats and writes to about 25 formats. Nice interface with a number of image editing functions. It can also receive images from scanners and cameras. NEW

Painter 25 : TOOLS for Backdrops, Effects, and Filters, Banners, Artistic, GIF and JPEG Optimizer, small BMP's; GADGETS: free floating buttons, labels, images, gradient text, smart shapes, bitmap fonts; IMAGE: layers, seamless patterns, trace, emboss, mirror, flip, free rotation, whirl, scroll, drip, crop, wave, shadow, filter, mask, glue and combine ; FORMATS: png, jpg, (transparent) gif,bmp,wmf,emf,ico,tif; TWAIN scanner support; PRINT: with preview; DRAW: clone brush, stars,polygons, mirrors, blocks,syms, spirals, arcs, curves, cubes, chords, pies, spirograph, maze, globe, concentric,anchored etc.; PATTERNS: create your own

P3dO Explorer is a light easy-to-use Explorer-ish graphics browser supporting all popular images files formats

Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or Server 2003. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. NEW

PaintStudio Lite 1.2 is a simple and easy to use freeware image viewing/editing application

Pawbrowse : Scroll down : advanced image viewing, browsing and management utility. Features include support for 13 common image formats, 25 image filters, a thumbnail browsing mode, full screen mode, slideshow mode, file management customization options, screen and window capture, file type association, send image to external editor and lots more.

PC Image Editor is a free graphics editor with many of the features of a professional product.
You can edit images from a variety of formats (BMP, GIF, JPG, TIFF, PCX, PNG, TGA, J2K, WMF, EMF, RAS); it contains an extremely user-friendly interface enabling you to work intuitively. Along with the usual assortment of file operations such as Copy, Move, Delete, and Rename; adjust colors in photos; apply filters such as Hue, Negative, Colorize, Posterize; Mosaic; rotations and transformations; Perspective and Skew; blur images; sharpen images; image resizing; setting an image as the desktop wallpaper. Additionally, it contains enhanced brushes and painting options. NEW

PhotoPlus 6 : import or create pictures and animations, manipulate colors and effects

Piccer is a (freeware) picture viewer

Pixia NEW

Get the functions of StudioLine Photo, most comprehensive image editing, management and archiving solution - at zero cost. Benefit from the full range of filters, effects, batch processing, and other innovative capabilities in a new, expanded user interface. Manage your photos and their descriptions in the program's ingenious image archive. Find images by any combination of system, camera, and custom tags. Import the most popular image-file formats (JPEG, BMP, PNG, PSD, RAW, GIF, TIFF, etc.). Share images via email, upload web galleries, produce high-resolution prints or run a slide show on your PC. Exchange images and their information with others. Includes CD/DVD backup, offload and export functions.

Photo Filter NEW

- Multiple images open at once.
- Many plugins.
- More than 100 filters.
- Feature packed.

Power Batch NEW

- Batch renaming, resizing, converting, printing, rotating, colour adjustment, cropping.
- Crop with aspect ratio confinement.
- Built-in FTP client!
- All program files are contained in a single folder.
- Converts JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, BITMAP and JPEG2000.
- Supports animated GIF and multipage TIFF.
- Contact sheets.
- Image effects.
- Add text.

Uticasoft Image Browser offers one of most effective and easiest ways to view images on your PC. There are many programs you can use to view images; but with Image Browser, you can simplify and increase the speed of your viewing. Image Browser is dedicated to image viewing and not image editing.

Web Picture Creator 1.5 (472 KB) is a tool for creating Internet photo albums and for resizing images, making thumbnails and copying images. It handles JPEG images (*.jpg, *.jpeg). Offers customizable HTML output that can be edited to match your site design. Add titles and descriptions to each image, specify the thumbnail size and output quality and more. Fr'eeware for Windows 98/ ME/ NT/ 2000/ XP.

XnView is a utility for viewing and converting graphic files.

VCW VicMan's Photo Editor is a versatile image editor with intuitive skinnable interface and a variety of features. This powerful application is user-friendly, offering users the simplicity of image editing, high productivity and easy customizing abilities.

Create cool gradient text for your website.

mosascii m2 is an application that converts an image into an HTML mosaic made out of ASCII characters. The HTML mosaics look just like the original image except they are created out of colored ASCII characters. mosascii m2 has lots of features, such as image actions and effects, and more!

Isaac creates animations, rollover effects, interactive tools, menus, presentations, site intros, and any other thing your imagination could suggest. And it does all this by simply manipulating some images with a visual interface, without writing code. Isaac produces HTML files that are ready to be copied or inserted into your web sites. Isaac can also generate animated GIFs. The animated GIF is now included when exporting, along with an HTML map for the links, as an alternative if the user disabled Java.

Easy Picture2Icon is a wonderful tool for converting images or digital photos in to Windows icons. Easy Picture2Icon make it possible to use any graphical editor to produce icons. Because Easy Picture2Icon has the ability to convert digital pictures in the formats BMP, GIF, JPEG, JPG and PNG to Windows icons (ICO). Easy Picture2Icon has support for making transparent icons and the user can choose which color to make transparent. With this picture to icon converter it is possible to make icon files that contain multiple icons of different sizes.

Rendera is a free graphics program suitable for artistic painting, photo-retouching, colorizing, and seamless tile design. It emulates common art tools and features an easy-to-learn, labeled interface. The edge-wrapping and interactive offset functions make it perfect for Web background tiles. Version 1.5 includes JPEG support, faster polygon rendering, and minor tweaks. NEW

Image rezisers

Gallery creators

Screen capture utilities

Color pickers

Image maps

3D editors

Make buttons

Set up your own shop at Cafe Press

Download Picasa

 

straight to the top

© Jenny Campbell