Two Open-Source Photo Editors for Startups
Should users consider an open-source platform as an alternative to commercial software?
With the commercial software, a single company develops the product, and sales fund its testing and development. Unlike open-source software, it’s developed collaboratively, supported by a team of volunteers, and allows anyone to distribute freely or improve the features. Plus, it’s totally free.
Here are the two open-source photo editors for startups we think do the job nicely (or you can check out a few others we talked about previously here)!
- GThumb
- Fotoxx
If you are an aspiring graphic artist, this simple open-source platform called GThumb is a good app to start with. It’s simply constructed for managing photos and comes packed with various tools for quickly tweaking basic settings such as brightness, contrast, saturation, adjusting white balance, and fixing other common image problems.
GThumb is not only just a photo editor, but also serves as an image viewer and browser application for GNOME desktop. It works well for handling photos and even video.
“It is easy to organize images into catalogs and preset categories, or create your own categories. A single click on the icon prints a photo. Add comments and tags to files effortlessly with a right click,” said Jack Germain of Linux Insider. “My most pleasant surprise in using GThumb is how easy it is to change image hue, saturation, lightness, contrast and colors.”
GThumb is lightweight and functions more than just a photo app. However, there are two drawbacks in comparison – first, its inability to open multiple images, and second, the inconvenience of resizing and scaling the images. Users must click the Tools menu, reset the size of the image, and then click the Execute button for the changes.
Another Linux photo app is Fotoxx, which is specifically designed for editing images. It features tools for stitching panoramas, annotating photos, and removing unwanted objects aside from its basic features for tweaking photos. Fotoxx can handle RAW images aside from the basic image file types like JPEG, GIF, TIFF, and more.
“RAW files can be imported and edited with 16-bit color depth. Areas or objects can be selected using freehand draw, follow edge, and tone matching. Selections can be edited with adjustable blending,” said Free Code.
You will find the rich features of Fotoxx under Retouch Menu, which include Brightness, Contrast, Sharpen, Noise Reduction, and more.
Both photo editors allow users to organize photos into collections. In this way, users can group the images by type (portraits, landscapes, macros, etc.) and by subject (people, flowers, buildings, etc.) or any criteria.