3 Great Free Software Programs to treat your photos.

I have been looking for free software to treat my photos. The first I discovered was GIMP, The GNU Image Manipulation Program. I am still using it and there are additional plugins that may be added to the program, it is very good indeed but not for beginners.

Then, because I found GIMP very difficult to learn well and heavy for my small PC memory, still working with Windows XP, I searched for a good free and fast program and I came then by chance to Photoscape that has the essential tools to enhance the quality of scanned film pictures.

One of my challenges is to transform a Black and White picture into color picture. This is possible with Photoscape with the tool Paint Brush holding the shift key down. But if you go a second time with the tool over an already zone the color changes to more dark and this may cause you waste of time to correct an accidental double brushing.

By chance I discovered this tool on line that only do that, colorize pictures. Very easy to use and efficient. It is called Colorize Photo and works online.

Bellow is a B&W picture I took with my RTB (round tin box) a pinhole camera I made recently. I used Ilford MG IV, f/200, some 10 seconds exposure. Developer was a home made Parodinal in dilution 1:5. And bellow it is a colorized picture I made with GIMP, using the tool Renderize-Fog with several colors and opacity. You don't control how the spots will be spread over the picture but choosing the right colors and their opacity, it is possible to get a more or less colorized artistic effect.

Brightness and contrast adjusstments in Photoscape

Above picture colorized with GIMP

Let us take now another B&W picture and see what one may have using both the online Colorize Photo and GIMP to spread some random spots to mask possible imperfections of my ability in using hand driven mouse to colorize the picture. The photo was taken with an Olympus Trip 35, a wonderful small 35 mm camera and using long expired film Kodak TMax 400 in a cloudy Spring day and developed with a coffee-Vit C-phenidone made after a Flickr friend, Jay De Fehr's, finding that phenidone is super additive with coffee and not only with Vit C, this is used in Kodak's XTol developer for quite a long time.

Olympus Trip 35 - TMax 400 - Caphenol

Using "Colorized Photo" and GIMP