These tools have all the basic image manipulation features for you everyday photo editing needs and are neither heavy on your Windows system, nor on your pocket . So, let’s just leave Photoshop for professional designers and take a look at these free image manipulation tools for Windows and see which one will suit you the best.
Adobe Photoshop Express
Adobe Photoshop Express for Windows enables photo magic at your fingertips. It’s a small pack of essential everyday photo-editing tools from Adobe to help you create better-looking pictures. It has many exciting features to enhance your photos and do easy touch-ups through functions like crop, rotate, flip, brightness, etc.
PC Image Editor
PC Image Editor is a solid but simple image-editing application. It’s built for beginners and professionals who like to customize or enhance photos with minimum effort. The super intuitive interface brings many editing tools and options such as unique filters, crop and rotate functions, colors and image adjustment features just to name a few.
Funny Photo Maker
Funny Photo Maker is the best photo editor for enhancing digital photos and making funny pictures. There are several options and tools for customizing your images. Some of its features include artistic photo effects, decorative frames, funny picture templates and other editing tools. It supports most popular image formats.
Photopus
Photopus is a fantastic batch photo editor which eases the customization of a large collection of images. It’s a powerful application with user-friendly interface and lots of options to edit photos with desired customization. It comes with a watermarker, image transformation tools and an image converter among other things.
Pos Free Photo Editor
Pos Free Photo Editor is a simple but feature-rich batch digital photo and image editing application. It lets you enhance, edit, print and manipulate pictures easily to create eye-catching graphics. It comes with various basic and advanced image enhancing tools and functions, special photo effects, rich text tools and supports many picture file types.
SuperPhoto
SuperPhoto for Windows 8 turns your digital images into awesome-looking photos. You can make incredible art pieces with outstanding photo effects. It’s feature-packed with 100+ cool effects to enhance your photos. Filters, combos, textures and patterns are among some of its supported editing features.
PhotoEffects
PhotoEffects, as its name suggests, is a powerful free photo editor for Windows 8. The tool offers easy and quick photo editing on-the-go and comes with a simple, clean and beautiful user interface with lots of built-in image manipulation tools. It offers you features such as photo effects, image filters, color and contrast, cosmetic tools and image sharing options. Only available for Windows 8.
Photo Booth Pro
Photo Booth Pro is a Windows 8 photo editing tool that lets you take your photos through your webcam with special photo effects. It comes with various photo and camera effects, a snap timer and even photo sharing options.
Paint.net
Paint.net is a large and growing design community of users, with lots of tutorials and plugins. It has an innovative user interface with features like layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.
PaintStar
PaintStar is a versatile digital image processing software suitable for tasks like retouching of photographs, composing and authoring images, image morphing, screen capture, and displaying image thumbnail in Windows Explorer context menu. It supports alpha, layer, path and other common editing techniques.
PhotoFiltre
PhotoFiltre is a great free tool that offers simple as well as advanced adjustments to an image and applies a gamut of filters on it. It is simple and intuitive to use, and has an easy learning curve. The tool comes with a layer manager (with Alpha channel), advanced brushes, batch modules and lot of other powerful tools.
Photoscape
Photoscape is the fun and easy photo editing software that enables you to fix and enhance photos. It has a very powerful editor for you to perform resizing, brightness and color adjustment, white balance, backlight correction, frames, balloons, mosaic mode, adding text, drawing pictures, cropping, filters, red eye removal and blooming.
VCW VicMan’s Photo Editor
VCW VicMan’s Photo Editor is one of the most versatile image editors for Windows with an intuitive interface and an array of features. It’s user-friendly, offers simple image editing, high productivity and easy customization.
Bonus: More Tools
PaintShop Pro
An inexpensive alternative to Photoshop, PaintShop Pro comes with unique color palettes, brushes, gradients, patterns and textures. Its intuitive interface offers faster navigation and a huge range of photo-editing and graphics creation tools.
Magix Photo Designer
Magix Photo Designer is a free alternative to the classic image editing programs. It lets you edit and optimize your digital pictures thus making it easy even for amateurs. With just a few clicks, turn your photos into paintings or fun caricatures.
It comes with handy features such as quick optimization, photo effects, collage maker and you can even make panoramas.
PhotoPad Image Editor
PhotoPad Image Editor is an easy digital photo-editing application which brings a remarkable set of features and support for all popular image formats. It comes packaged with basic editing tools, dazzling photo effects, photo adjustment tools and various other capabilities. It also allows you to make stunning photo collages and mosaics.
Artweaver
Artweaver is a Windows Freeware program to simulate natural brush tools. It is, therefore, suitable to leave your creativity free run. Artweaver offers you a clear program window and is very easy to learn.
Viscom Photo
Viscom Photo is an easy to use batch photo editor and collage maker. It comes with drag and drop features, Office 2007-like clean user interface and support for reading and writing various image file formats. Some of its features include an easy collage maker, background templates, image editing in batch mode etc.