Recommend a photo editing app, please!

Just as the title says, I’m looking for recommendations for photo editing apps.

I don’t want goofy, make people fat, ugly, whatever, not like that.

I just want to do some basic stuff (crop, rotate, enhance color, white balance!), before I send the photo to a wireless printer. (Thanks Santa!)

Ease of use is pretty important to me.

So do any of you use such an app? Have you tried others? What have your experiences been like? (I use an Apple computer, if that helps! IPad mini w retina screen!)

I love Snapseed for iPhone and Android. I’ve tried the desktop version, not as enjoyable to use.

For simple stuff I use Graphic Converter.

I own Photoshop so for complicated stuff I switch to that, but it’s $$$expensive… I’ve used the free X11 application The Gimp and I’d use it more often were it not for the fact that it won’t save in native Photoshop format. (Hence, once I start a complex project in Gimp, I’m stuck with continuing in Gimp, can’t switch to Photoshop.

Picassa is fine for your needs. But iPhoto should do it all as well.

Acorn is wonderful if you’re on Mac. And it’s very affordable. For mobile I second snapseed.

Yeah, I’d look at iPhoto before anything else as, for a start, you probably already have it.

On a pc a good free viewer with simple editing is Irfanview. Photoshop Elements 12 or13 does 90% of what real Photoshop does.

+1 for iPhoto. Regardless of what you use I’d recommend something in that style - a photo downloader/manager combined with adjustment tools.

Lightroom is a good choice if you need heavy duty stuff now.

Apple has plans to release a new photo app in 2015 that will probably be something like iPhoto with more editing features. If you use iPhoto now you’ll presumably have an easy upgrade path to the new app when it’s released.

Snapseed is excellent if you want to edit on your ipad.

Check out Pixelmator at the iOS App Store. The desktop-computer version has been around for years and often is touted as the poor man’s Photoshop. I use it mostly for photo restoration.
I don’t know how well the iOS version works. It was released only recently. There may be tutorials on it on YouTube. There’s a ton of them there on the desktop version.

Thank you all for your many suggestions, I feel like I have a place to start now. Yay!

Picasa is very good as is FastStone.
GIMP is really fantastic but may have a bit of a learning curve.

(tl;dr version: if you have access to iPhoto, give it a try–it is an excellent tool)

A few thoughts on this…

Most cheap and cheerful tools will allow you to open file1234.jpg, change it, and then save it again as file1234.jpg.

This means that you lose the original photo, and you will be degrading the quality of the photo each time you open it and re-save it.
This is not normally a problem for folks who just want to clean some stuff up before printing out photos of friends and family, but it is something that you should consider.

If you want to use a basic editor like this, you may wish to make the originals read-only before opening them, and then save the photos with a different name (e.g. photo1234.jpg–>photo1234-edited.jpg).

Beyond simple editing, the next problem that photo tools address is how to deal with all of your photos: how to catalog them, sort them, rate them, and find them and so on. Like iTunes for photos.
This is normally referred to as Digital Asset Management.

And yet another cool kind of photo application is the nondestructive editor. Lightroom and iPhoto/Aperture are the poster children for this feature. The new Photos app in OS X will also have to support this.

If you have access to a free copy of iPhoto, give it a try. It combines a good digital asset manager with a very nice nondestructive editor.

If you use iPhoto, the changes you make, such as straightening, cropping, and some retouching are all tracked as a list of changes, but they are not saved into the source file. When you open iPhoto, you see a rendered version of the photo with the tweaks (which you can print and/or email to people), but you can always access the original. This means that no matter what you do, you can always edit more next year, and you can always go back to the original file. They don’t clog your hard drive with extra copies either: the only thing saved is the list of tweaks (e.g. set WB to 2700K, increase exposure 1 stop, crop to 5x7).

These DAM+Nondestructive Editor tools like iPhoto/Aperture and Lightroom are very good and are often the bread and butter of serious photographers. I spend most of my time in Lightroom, with very little need for true pixel-based editors such as Photoshop. These tools generally handle all of the basic adjustment needs of a pro: there are wedding photographers out there doing serious work from week to week using nothing more than Lightroom or Aperture.

Photoshop and its brethren are far more complex to work with than the simple editors in iPhoto/Aperture/Lightroom, but can do wonderful things. Nevertheless, I would steer clear of these tools if possible in the beginning.

On the PC side you might give Paint.Net (www.getpaint.net) a try. It’s free and will do the things you describe. I’ve been using it for a few years now. My only complaint is that it does not make true grayscale TIFF or JPEG files, and I often need true grayscale. In those instances I still use Paint.Net for most of the effort then use GIMP for grayscale rendering.

I use XnView for basic photo work. It has gama correction which is great for black and white and is very efficient at cropping, rotating, color correction etc…

Agreed. I’m impressed at how much bang for buck you get with this app. There is also Lightroom for mobile, but Snapseed should suffice for most. I use Lightroom and Photoshop every day on my computer, but on my iPad and IPhone, I just use Snapseed (even though I have Lightroom, too.)