Photoscape is free program that I have grown quite fond of in the past couple of weeks. The download (15.45Mb) and installation to my XP machine was fast and encountered no problems. 

The opening screen present you with several Icons representing the key features of the software:

• Viewer: View photos in your folder, create a slideshow
• Editor: resizing, brightness and color adjustment, white balance, backlight correction, frames, balloons, mosaic mode, adding text, drawing pictures, cropping, filters, red eye removal, blooming
• Batch editor: Batch edit multiple photos
• Page: Merge multiple photos on the page frame to create one final photo
• Combine: Attach multiple photos vertically or horizontally to create one final photo
• Animated GIF: Use multiple photos to create a final animated photo
• Print: Print portrait shots, carte de visites(CDV), passport photos
• Splitter: Slice a photo into several pieces
• Screen Capture: Capture your screenshot and save it
• Color Picker: Zoom in on images, search and pick a color
• Rename: Change photo file names in batch mode
• Raw Converter: Convert RAW to JPG
• Paper Print: Print lined, graph, music and calendar paper
• Face Search: Find similar faces on the Internet

I really like the viewer page setup. It gives you an explorer window  in the upper left with thumbnail views of the selected directory on the right. Upon selecting one of the thumbnails it gives you larger view of  it in the lower left of the screen. Doubleclicking on the larger view brings it up in a full screen view. Right clicking brings up  a menu of choices first of which is the full editor. Other choices are for copying, rotating,  slide show, etc. Personally I would prefer the doubleclick option taking me to the editor rather than the full screen view, but that’s just me.

The editor has most of  the  standard features of other similar programs as noted in the list above.  At the bottom of the screen is a multi tabbed layout of buttons with drop down arrows. Clicking the button will apply a default choice for the option selected. You can change the default by using the drop down arrow which I thought was a handy feature. The framing section has a lot of templates to choose from plus other selections that allow you to customize the frames in many ways.

Go here

to see some Photos I processed with Photoscape. There are many parts I haven’t explored yet but so far I think it is a very nice package.  Enjoy!