Image Editing Tools

For my image editing I normally use GIMP. It’s open source and it’s very powerful. For some application, it even beats Photoshop. GIMP is full of customizable editing tools and effects. But Gimp is slow at bootup time (which is the case with many open source programs) and many of the tools require several seconds before application.

For simple image editing tasks, I use IrfanView. Some people call this freeware tool the Swiss Army Knife of image viewers. IrfanView is a remarkable multimedia management and editing suite. If you have a hard drive full of photos that need organizing, converting and retouching, IrfanView is it!

Both tools are great and I warmly recommend them. What I would like is an image editing tool, which is somewhere between IrfanView (www.irfanview.com) and GIMP (www.gimp.org).

Now, this evening I did some research and I found several free image editing tools. I wanted to ask you, my dear WA members, if you have any experience using one or the other program:

• Fotor (www.fotor.com)
• Image Tricks (www.belightsoft.com/products/imagetricks)
• Pixlr (pixlr.com)
• Seashore (seashore.sourceforge.net)
• Splashup (edmypic.com/splashup)
• Sumopaint (www.sumopaint.com)

Especially Splashup and Sumopaint impressed me. These are two pretty powerful online editing tools.

If you are or have been using one or even several ones of those, please let me know what your experience is or was. And very important: Is there a manual or an online tutorial available.