Free up your edits
There’s no escaping the fact that high-end image-editing programs are expensive. Adobe software counts as the gold standard, but using Lightroom and Photoshop requires a £10 monthly subscription. Alternatively, DxO PhotoLab 5 can be bought as a one-off license, but the fully featured Elite edition costs £200. Some excellent cheaper alternatives are available, too, including Skylum Luminar, Affinity Photo, Corel AfterShot Pro, and Zoner Photo Studio. Most of these offer 30-day free trials, to help find out whether they suit your needs.
However, there’s also some very competent imaging software available for free. Of course, you rarely get something for nothing, so often there are strings attached. You might have to put up with adverts, or some variation on the ‘freemium’ model, in which a basic version of the software is offered for free, but you pay to enable the more advanced features. Here’s our pick of some of the best free imaging software available.
Manufacturers’ software
The most obvious starting point is the free software provided by your camera manufacturer. In general, this will allow you to browse through your images and process raw files, usually with a fairly comprehensive set of options for adjusting colour, white balance, brightness and tonality. You can also expect tools for correcting lens aberrations and fixing perspective issues such as converging verticals. As a
