Pixelitor

There’s a lot you can do to an image to enhance how it looks. You can draw anything you want on it, you can apply one of many filters, you can rotate or flip it, you can adjust the brightness or the colors, and more. All these functions and more are put at your disposal by Pixelitor. Mind you, they’re offered for the great price of free. That’s right! Pixelitor is a free image editing tool that has quite a lot to offer!

Pixelitor, as of version 2.0, is a Java-based application. This means that you will need to have Java 7 or newer on your machine for Pixelitor to work. It also means that Pixelitor will work on multiple platforms. Since Java is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, the Java-based Pixelitor application will work on machines powered by Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Pixelitor’s interface is just what you would expect from a photo editing tool: the image you’re working on is presented front and center; several editing tools are presented on the left hand side; a panel that presents all the layers is on the right hand side. It must be mentioned here that from the View menu you can pick and choose what elements are displayed on the interface. You can, for example, hide the aforementioned Layers panel.

As I mentioned at the start of this article, Pixelitor has quite a lot to offer. Load a photo into the application and you can: draw using a brush tool; remove unwanted elements with an eraser tool; apply a variety of shapes; crop the image; add custom text; add layers; adjust the brightness, contrast, color balance and color levels; use one of many filters. When you’re done editing the photo, you can save it as a PNG, BMP, GIF, PXC, or JPEG file.

Pixelitor is free and open source software.

There’s much to like about Pixelitor: it works on multiple platforms, it has a familiar interface, it puts lots of photo editing options at your disposal, it is free and open source.