Is there a powerful and free lightweight graphics editor?

Better than Paint, less intesive than PS? ie Opera for Graphics

[Clark]

Lately I need to do lightweight graphics stuff regularly and I am NOT a graphics person. Photoshop takes up too many resources, loads too slowly and causes my ftp to die for lack of RAM.

I tried using paint. Their undo is so bad and features likewise that it's not usable. Is there a free alternative to photoshop that lets you do the basics and loads real fast?

I used to love PSP when it was more lightweight and free.

[bonedome]

The Gimp is free and very similar to Photoshop, but I'm not sure how resorce friendly it is.

What sort of thing do you need to do? Are you working with photos or drawings mainly?

[Clark]

Photos but just copying an image, cutting, pasting, cropping. Layers would be nice but not absolutely essential.

[Don_Hoagie]

If all you're doing is cropping, resizing, rotating, blahblah... any camera photo software or new-age generic image editor (iPhoto if you have a Mac) will do all these things easily. Do you have access to anything like that? For instance, do you or whoever takes these photos have the camera software that came with the camera used? These have now become very basic functions for any image editor to perform... layers on the other hand, to my knowledge, are mainly for full-on photo/graphics programs, which will indeed eat up resources.

Photoshop Elements is without a doubt better for your particular needs than full Photoshop- it's MUCH cheaper (79 bucks i believe) and more bare-bones, but far better than any of the stuff I mentioned above. From the sound of it, you probably won't even notice the difference between the two programs. You could check that out and see if it's acceptable as far as how much PC it eats up.

One thing to remember about full Photoshop... I don't know what kind of work you're doing there... but if it's a repetitive thing... something that could be automated, like turning tons of 1600x1200 digital color photos into 640x480 black and whites, you can create Actions in PS that will do all of that stuff automatically. The time you save will be well worth it (Photoshop Elements to my knowledge does not have these recordable Actions).

[netzilla]

well if just only for for croping resizing copying pasting.
"Irfanview" is what you need. It is light weight and has many features including adding text to your photos.

[Clark]

Excellent. I'll try it. Thank you.

[Johan007]

jasc Paint Shop Pro?

[Beagle]

jasc Paint Shop Pro?

Good program, but it's not free.

[Profero]

If you just need a fast and easy tool for editing photos before publishing on the web, this free online image editor can be the solution:
[webbild.com...]

[icon_kid]

The most powerful, yet easy to use paint program for any Windows OS is called Ultimate Paint. If you don't need to do layering, UP has just about everything else you need. It's not free, but if you can get thirty-five dollars from somewhere, you can get a registered copy of a program that you'll love using every day.

Go to: [ultimatepaint.com...]