Painting the Web

A Survey of Desktop Photo Editors

There are so many photo editors, it was hard to focus on which ones I wanted to survey for this book. There were some that obviously needed to be included, for their market share if no other reason. Others I included because of their quality in comparison to their relatively low (or no) cost.

Some tools work only in Windows, and others in multiple operating systems, including Linux, though this operating system had the fewest offerings. I even extended the survey to explore a few of the new online photo editing tools—a new and interesting breed of software that bypasses the whole operating system requirement.

The key item for me with all of the applications I examined was whether each provided the minimum set of operations I deemed critical for publishing photos to the Web. Let's revisit that list:

• Primitive-level support, such as being able to resize/resample and crop

• Support for RAW images, either directly or through some form of plug-in or third-party tool

• Support for color profiles and color space

• The capability to export or save in any number of formats, including TIFF, PNG, JPEG, and GIF, as well as save in-process work

• The capability to back out any number of edits for those times when my experimentation really goes wrong

• The capability to remove an abstraction, flaw, or dust—especially dust—from the photo, using some form of cloning

• Some support for effects and filters, especially blur and sharpening

• Color and light manipulation, including levels, ...