One of the things I use (or rather, used to use) my laptop for was photo editing. I’d take the usual hundreds of pix of the Firebug, and go through them on the laptop on the way to and from work. (My wife and I carpool together; she does most of the driving. It’s a good use of the time.)
My old Lenovo Thinkpad laptop with Windows 7 died at the beginning of last year. It came with a photo editor that more than met my requirements. I’ve got a new Lenovo Thinkpad with Windows 10, and while it’s got a photo editor, it’s much more cumbersome to use than the old one.
What I need:
Within the editor, one keystroke or mouse click to get from one photo to the next in a file.
Cropping.
Redeye removal.
Separate easy-to-use brightness adjustments for the too-bright and the too-dark parts of a photo.
The editor on the old laptop had all of these.
The new one doesn’t have (1). You’ve got to go back to the folder with your pix, and click on the next pic there to load it into the editor. If you’re trying to go through a hundred photos, this gets extremely tiresome. Hell, it gets tiresome after a half-dozen photos.
(2) and (3) are no problem. (I can’t imagine an editor these days where they’d be a problem.)
The new laptop has (4), except for the easy-to-use part. Instead of adjusting brightness/shade via a horizontal or vertical slider, the slider is circular. Yes, you’ve got to drag your mouse around a circle to adjust the brightness. Of course, this means that rather than moving the cursor more or less automatically while you watch the photo, you’ve got to focus on your cursor to make sure you’re staying on the circle as you do this adjustment. Drives me fucking nuts, a problem that I’ve dealt with by saying ‘to hell with photo editing until I find a new editor.’
But the photos, they continue to pile up. I really need a new editor.
(ETA: I personally use PaintShop Pro 4, PaintShop Pro 7, and Photoshop CS 2. I see that the latest base version of PaintShop Pro is on sale for 40 bucks, if that counts as cheap to you.)
Another vote for paint.net for ease of use and being much, much less demanding on your system specs than something like GIMP. It’s also very powerful through the use of the many excellent plugins.
Paint.NET is my favorite photo editing program. GIMP is designed to replace Photoshop, but I’m not a fan of that interface.
But based on the OP’s requirements, I concur that Irfanview is probably the best. The other two aren’t really made for batch operations. You can set it up to do the same operation on many images. It will certainly do #1 and #2, I’ve never tried red eye but it looks like it does that. I’m not sure what #4 means, reducing the contrast?
You and I are two peas in a pod, because I’ve been using Irfanview forever and still do for some things where it works better than Paint.net, like batch operations.
But now you just made me realize I wasn’t focusing enough on the OP’s use case, which is exactly the use case of a friend of mine who recently asked me for a similar recommendation. After realizing what he really wanted was something like Lightroom, but free, I showed him Digikam.
OP, if you’re like my friend, that’s what you were looking for.
This is the first I’ve heard of PhotoScape. So I’m not sure why you think I’ve have an opinion on it to recommend it or not.
GIMP does have a batch editing function, but it isn’t anywhere near as user friendly as Irfanview. And in GIMP and Paint.NET the only way to switch between images is to open a bunch of them in memory and Ctrl+Tab or whatever. Whereas in Irfan you can just use the arrow keys and AFAIK only one image is open at a time.
Looks interesting, that one is new to me, though the name sounds vaguely familiar.
Edit: the OTHER useful free graphics program is Inkscape, though it is completely unsuitable for the OP’s current purposes. Still worth checking out (it replaces Adobe Illustrator).
Don’t know. The old laptop went dead as a doornail overnight. I used the photo software that was built in when I bought it. I’m pretty sure it was just whatever photo editor that Microsoft included as standard equipment at that point.