Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple image and photo editor tool. It has been compared to other digital photo editing software packages such as Adobe® Photoshop®, Corel® Paint Shop Pro®, Microsoft Photo Editor, and The GIMP.

The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with a small amount of C++ for installation and shell-integration related functionality. The source code is available under the terms of the MIT License.

Developer: Paint.NET Team
License: Freeware
OS: Windows All
Size: 1.5 MB
Download Paint.NET 3.31 link

IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative freeware (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows.

IrfanView is trying to create new and/or interesting features in its own way, unlike some other graphic viewers, whose whole “creativity” is based on feature cloning, stealing of ideas and whole dialogs from ACDSee and/or IrfanView.

Some IrfanView features: Many supported file formats; Multi language support; Thumbnail/preview option; Paint option - to draw lines, circles, arrows, straighten image etc.; Toolbar skins option; Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD); Show EXIF/IPTC/Comment text in Slideshow/Fullscreen etc.; Support for Adobe Photoshop Filters; Fast directory view (moving through directory); Batch conversion (with image processing); Multipage TIF editing; File search; Email option; Multimedia player; Print option; Support for embedded color profiles in JPG/TIF; Change color depth; Scan (batch scan) support; Cut/crop; IPTC editing; Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.); Capturing; Extract icons from EXE/DLL/ICLs; Lossless JPG rotation; Many hotkeys; Many command line options; Many PlugIns; Only one EXE-File, no DLLs, no Shareware messages; No registry changes without user action/permission and much much more.

Developer: Irfan Skiljan
License: Freeware
OS: Windows All
Size: 1.1 MB
Download IrfanView 4.10 link

coverXP is a software that allows you to print your covers in seconds and in style.

Cover printing has never been so easy or so complete, simply drag your covers inside the software directly from your browser and click the print icon. that’s all there is to it - your new covers will be printed in seconds.

The free version coverXP is unlimited in time and uses it only displays adds while you prepare and print your covers.

Developer: Darkwet Network
License: Freeware
OS: Windows All
Size: 3,2 MB
Download coverXP Free 1.61 link

FreeVimager is the Free Image Viewer & Editor for Windows. It can as well play avi video files and some type of audio files. There are many tools around doing that, but the aim of this Freeware is to be a small and handy tool doing what it says and running also as a standalone exe file (installer not necessary).

Features
* View & Edit graphics file of type: jpeg, bmp, gif, tiff (multi-page), png and pcx
* Works with all Windows versions from 95 up to VistaImage
* Multi-monitor support: switch form one monitor to another through context menu or TAB key
* Unicode support: Open, Edit, Batch Process or Batch Rename your files named in russian, indian, chinese, japanese…
* EXIF is displayed and all data are kept when editing and saving images
* IPTC & XMP single file / batch editing support for jpeg and tiff files
* Batch Processing and CD / DVD Slideshow creation
* Recursive directory slideshow to view all files in a directory and it’s subdirectories
* Print Preview with image positioning by dragging
* Size optimized Email sending of image(s)
* Well known editing features like: rotate, crop, resize, brightness, contrast, sharpen, …
* Live configurable Redeye removal tool
* Live Ansel Adams Zone System Histogram under Brightness, Contrast, … (thanks Jordi for the suggestion)
* Transparent borders tool (save the result to the alpha channel for png, tiff or bmp)
* Twain Scan multiple pages to tiff and pdf (possibility to Email directly)
* Avi video player has draggable borders in full-screen mode
* Live audio / video time shift slider (to fix out of sync. videos)
* Choosable GDI or DirectX video rendering in YUV or RGB mode
* Basic Audio and CD player
* Zip extraction (context menu entry available)

Developer: Contaware.com
License: Freeware
OS: Windows All
Size: 10.5 MB
Download FreeVimager 1.5.5 link

Easy GIF Animator is powerful yet very easy to use software for creating and editing animated GIF images. With this animated GIF editor you can easily create animated pictures, banners and buttons in no time. You can use special features to add stunning visual effects and prepare your animation for publishing on your web page. Easy GIF Animator supports all types of GIF animation and provides high compression and great quality for your animated GIF images. To top it all off, Easy GIF Animator is the best priced animated GIF editor on the market today.

The latest version of our GIF animator includes a built-in image editor, banner wizard and special tools to make your experience even more productive.

Developer: Blumentals Software
License: Shareware
OS: Windows All
Size: 2.5 MB
Download Easy GIF Animator 4.6 link

ACDSee Photo Editor, the perfect software for creating amazing digital projects with your photos. Take photos and combine them with digital scrapbooking kits to make pages that will be treasured for a lifetime. In Photo Editor, tasks such as writing text on a path, resizing multiple embellishments, and creating a vignette effect are all easy and straightforward. In addition to creating scrapbook pages, use ACDSee Photo Editor to create birth announcements, thank you cards and many more printable gifts for family, friends and relatives. Your imagination is the limit!

Learn with How-tos
* Turn family photos into digital magic with Photo Editor’s How-tos

Stylize a Photo
* Choose from a wide range of adjustments and filters that give your photos an artistic touch

Create Photo Crafts
* Share your memories in creative ways. Enhance, stylize, crop, and print your photos for your paper craft project, or create an entirely digital scrapbook page

Easy Fixes
* Use powerful and fast fix tools including Red Eye, Dodge, Burn, Sharpen, and Smudge

Advanced Features
* As you get more advanced and want more precision in the ways you create, explore Photo Editor’s masking capabilities

Developer: ACD Systems
License: Freeware
OS: Windows All
Size: 55.4 MB
Download ACDSee Photo Editor 4.0.211 link

WinDjView is a fast, compact and powerful DjVu viewer for Windows with continuous scrolling and advanced printing options. It uses the free DjVuLibre library to decode DjVu documents. DjVu is a web-centric format and software platform for distributing documents and images.

Windows version features:

* Supports Windows 2k/XP and later (a build for Win 98/ME/NT is provided, but it may be unstable)
* Single page, continuous, facing and continuous-facing layouts
* UI languages: English, Russian (older versions: also Ukrainian, French, Portuguese, Chinese Simplified, Tatarish). To install, download the corresponding dll and put it to the same folder as executable
* Thumbnails
* Contents
* Bookmarks
* Annotations
* Hyperlinks
* Text searching and copying
* Advanced printing
* Fullscreen mode
* Magnifying glass
* Mouse wheel scrolling
* Export pages to bmp
* Rotate pages
* Zoom to page, page width, 100% or custom zoom
* Brightness, contrast and gamma adjustment
* Display modes (Color/Black&White/Foreground/Background)
* Keyboard shortcuts for scrolling and navigation
* If requested, associates with djvu files in Explorer

Developer: Andrew Zhezherun
License: Freeware
OS: Windows All
Size: 0.5 MB
Download WinDjView 0.5 link

AMS Photo Effects is a new program for processing photos with the help of various filters. With it, you can completely transform any image. The program allows you to use more than 50 effects, including both traditional and original ones. You will be able to take a look at your photos in the rain and snow, in fog and up in the sky, add some sun light to it or swirl it in a typhoon.

You can combine effects and create truly fantastic compositions. It is possible to apply the selected filters both to the entire image and to its parts highlighting the most important fragment of the photo. Photo Effects will help to decorate your home photo album, website and will even allow you to create an original greeting card.

Photo Effects makes it possible to not only process, but also decorate photos. It offers you more than 100 frames and masks that will decorate portraits, landscapes and even simple casual shots. It is important that you can apply effects both before and after you decorate a photo. Combining effects and frames is one of the main features of the program. For example, you can apply a classic frame and then use lighting effects to add realistic sunlight to its contour. Try to use this feature more often and you will see how pretty the images Photo Effects creates are.

Photo Effects has an intuitive interface and it is easy to learn how to use the program. You will be able to easily process and decorate photos, combine effects and do much more in just a couple of minutes. You can see three main features of the program on its three tabs:

* Effects. There are five categories of filters here: color effects, lighting effect, traditional, artistic and distortion filters.
* Decoration. If you open this tab, you will find five types of frames, including classic frames, relief frames, masks, etc.
* Composition. This feature allows you to position your photo on the page in a beautiful way with the help of perspective adjustment. You can make the image fly in space, rotate it, add a shadow or glowing.

Developer: AMS Software
License: Shareware
OS: Windows All
Size: 15.8 MB
Download AMS Photo Effects 1.35 link

Greeting Card Studio is an easy-to-use application that enables users to make high-quality greeting cards featuring their own family photos and text. The program comes packed with professionally designed templates and matching graphics. Just supply the paper, choose your desired design, open the design template, personalize and print!

You may also create your own unique design and enhance picture with effects, spice up your creation with borders, frames, backgrounds and clipart. Zoom, rotate, and flip the photo inside the card until it looks perfect. When you are finished with your work you can save it as digital file.

Show Off Your Smile
* Make last minute adjustments to your digital photos so they look perfect in the selected theme. Tools include, Zoom In, Zoom Out, Rotate, Flip, Color Balance, etc.

Customize Your Greeting
* For a more personalized touch, add a funny or thoughtful message to your card design. Text controls include: Font, Size, Align Left or Center, Text Color, Bold, Italics. The product includes a lot of greeting texts for many occasions.

Download Extra Card Designs
* After registration you can download more card designs to add to your current collection.

Save Cards as Projects
* Save each card design as a project file for opening, editing and printing later.

Print Cards
* Print your photo greeting cards on 4×6 and other photo paper from all of the major brands such as Kodak, Avery, HP, Canon, Epson, etc.

Developer: AMS Software
License: Shareware
OS: Windows All
Size: 10.5 MB
Download Greeting Card Studio 1.27 link