With cameras being fitted to nearly all electronic devices these days there has been a surge in popularity in image editing software. If it’s not touching up your snaps to give them that David Bailey look then it’s letting your creative juices boil through creating your own images, designs and graphics from scratch; image editing software offers you a wealth of possibilities. In this post we look at some of our favourite tools and what makes them so good.

Adobe Photoshop

It is pretty much industry standard these days, being used by photographers, web designers and graphic designers. Packed with a huge number of features to tweak, manipulate and bend images to your will as well as some excellent tools for making your own graphics, Photoshop is probably the most complete package, especially when used alongside its CS (Adobes Creative Suite package) comrades.

The most recently released version was CS5, with features like Content Aware are the digital equivalent of magic, being so advanced when used properly they will blow your socks of on your first use. Adobe has also given a sneak peak at Adobe Photoshop CS6, so we won’t have to wait long to see what more wizardry they have crammed into it.

Gimp

Responsible for many awkward conversations, the catchy named GNU Image Manipulation Program, or Gimp for short, is an open source image editing program which offers a stripped back Photoshop-style experience. The free software allows you to achieve impressive results on even low power machines such as netbooks, however if you are looking for more functionality then you can bulk up the program with a wide array of plug-ins offering a host of new functionality and toys to play with.

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