The retouchables: criminally cheap alternatives to Photoshop

Updated November 11, 2005

The bad news: too many digital photographers don't bother to organize or retouch their pictures. But take it from your audience; most photos could stand some touch-up, whether it's as little as removing the red-eye or as serious as removing the telephone pole growing out of someone's head. Nor do we want to see shot after shot of the same scene, simply because you didn't take the time to pick the best one.

The good news: you don't have to be an imaging whiz with a Photoshop-size software budget in order to quickly fix and organize your photos. These software packages were designed with you in mind--they'll take you by the hand and lead you or let you blast your way through a whole batch--and all cost a miserly $150 or less. Some are even free; the Gimp, an open-source photo editor and one of the older, more refined examples of open-source development, gets rave reviews from users.

Most of these products try to be end-to-end digital photography solutions, from input to output. That's a lot of territory to cover, so we derive each features rating from what we consider to be the four key constituent parts: organizing, retouching (fixing image flaws), creating projects (using the photos as content for something else), and sharing. Those are the ratings we report in the table below.