Freeware Photo Editors: Crop / Cut Images With These Free Programs
Many-a-times, we simply need to cut, crop or resize an image - to either remove an interfering element, or to highlight an element. And to buy an expensive image editing software for minor touch-ups like cutting and cropping is not the most practical thing to do. Luckily, there are many tools which would do it for free. Right from full-featured freeware image editors to specialized programs that just cut and crop to online programs which run directly off your browser, this article introduces you to 8 free photo editing software — crop & cut — tools.
1. GIMP 2.6
Website : https://www.gimp.org/
Windows, Linux, Mac
GIMP, or the GNU Image Manipulation Program, is the closest you can get in functionality to Photoshop, without having to spend a penny. This totally free and extremely powerful image editing software not only cuts and crops images, but does everything (well, almost) that an advanced editor like Photoshop does.Available across multiple platforms (Windows/Linux/Mac OS), GIMP is worth a try if you want a simple but extremely powerful image editor. Learn how to cut and crop images using GIMP here and here.
2. Google Picasa 3.8
Website: https://picasa.google.com/
Windows, Linux, Mac
Currently in v3.8, Picasa by Google needs no introductions. A full-fledged photo catalogue with lots of photo editing tools to straighten, crop, cut or improve contrast and remove red-eyes. Coupled with a intuitive interface and easy searches through tags, Picasa is a must have in all computers. Its available across multiple platforms too. Here’s a short tutorial on editing images using Picasa.
3. Irfan View 4.27
Website: https://www.irfanview.com/
Windows
Irfan View is a quick and compact image editor, which again boasts of a whole lot of capabilities other than to crop & cut images. Each version gets more feature-rich than the previous one, and the current version offers support and interconversion to multiple file formats, supports multiple languages, is skin-able, supports paints batch conversion, scanning, loss-less JPG operations, hotkeys and plugins. With IrfanView, you can keep it as simple or as advanced as you choose.
4. PhotoScape 3.5
Windows
Not often do you come across software that is packed with features yet is simple to use. PhotoScape is one such program, and it really becomes a habit once you start using it.Divided into different modules - Viewer, Editor, Batch Editor, Grid Layouts, etc., the software is very well organized. The Editor module offers a flexible crop tool as also a circular crop tool. Touching up, tone adjustments, sharpening, resizing and adding frames and texts are some of the things you can do with PhotoScape. All in all, a nifty and useful little tool indeed. A review of Photoscape.
5. Photo Crop Editor 2.0
Windows
An interactive photo cropping software, Photo Crop Editor does very well the one thing it is built to do - cut and crop images. It works well even if the foreground and background are of similar colors. All one needs to do is mark around the object of interest using the mouse, left-click to select the foreground or right-click for the background. The program automatically does the rest. The newly cut image can then be re-sized, rotated or placed on a new background.
6. Photo Pos Lite
Windows
A younger sibling of the Photo Pos Pro version, the free Lite version still packs in quite a punch. One can cut, crop, clone, use special effects, paint or add color gradients. It supports multiple scanners and cameras and multiple file formats. A very intuitive interface reduces the learning curve. Overall, a very good software for beginners.
7. Photo Pad Image Editor
Windows
The next free photo editing software to cut and crop images is Photo Pad Image Editor. This no-nonsense software is designed to be easy and intuitive, while offering ability to cut, crop, resize, rotate and flip photos. It supports diverse image formats and is also capable of other effects like saturation, contrast, color tones, etc.
8. Cut My Pic
Online Tool
And to save the best for the last, the one free tool to crop and cut images that I really liked the most is Cut My Pic. for starters, its not a software at all, in the sense, you don’t need to install it in your computer. Its a website - www.cutmypic.com - whose sole purpose is to cut and crop any pic you choose to. The extremely intuitive site also shows you the size (in pixels) of your selection in real time, allows you to soften or round edges and gives a preview before actually cropping your image. Full marks to this site for doing the job with utmost perfection
I hope you enjoyed going through the various freeware and trying them out as much as I did. Do let us know your opinion on any of the above freeware or another software that you prefer to use for cropping and cutting images. Have fun!
