Group test: what's the best digital photography software?

5. GIMP 2.6

• Reviewed on: 18 May 11
• RRP: Free
• Rating:

Championed by Linux users everywhere, GIMP  is an entirely free-to-use image editing program. Despite its shortcomings, GIMP 2.6 offers all the core re-touching tools you’ll need and a lot more besides. If you don’t have money to spend on photo-editing software then you can use Google Picasa to manage your collection and switch to GIMP when more complex editing is required.

4. Google Picasa 3.8

• Reviewed on: 19 May 11
• RRP: Free
• Rating:

Google Picasa 3.8 is a free photo management application which also offers basic, yet powerful, image editing functionality. Picasa is a great way to manage your photos and a good starting point for anyone new to photo editing. However, if you want to re-touch images or work with layers and masks then you'll need to upgrade to a full-strength image editing program.

 

3. Zoner Photo Studio Free 14

• Reviewed on: 1 March 12
• RRP: FREE
• Rating:

All in all, Zoner Studio Free is probably the best free photo editing software to be had. Unless you're a pro who needs dual-monitor support, HDR, batch operation, and advanced photo correction filters provided by the pay version, the free version is probably all you need. Now if Zoner would just let me get rid of that darn delete confirmation dialog.

2. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 6

• Reviewed on: 9 June 11
• RRP: £69 inc. VAT
• Rating:

Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 6 is a fully fledged creative suite for the price of an image editor. Xara doesn’t compromise on features in any area.

1. Adobe Photoshop Elements 10

• Reviewed on: 21 September 11
• RRP: £79 inc. VAT
• Rating:

I appreciate that Photoshop Elements 10's editor has much of the power of and a similar interface to Photoshop CS 5.1 - and I like using the editor. But the organizer, which has so many potentially useful tools, continues to suffer from major performance issues, and its integration with the editor remains poor, despite Adobe's latest efforts. Compared to Google Picasa 3.8, which offers many of the same nifty features - including face tagging and duplicates finding - but in a better-performing, more-flexible, free package - Elements 10's organizer isn't competitive. If Adobe wants its organizer to succeed, the company needs to boost the tool's performance and flexibility so that it outperforms what you can get for free.