2015 Image Editing Software Roundup - What Do You Use?

I'm a total NOOB. I use Infranview to view and picasa to edit. totally free, very user friendly . I have used GIMP like you Sdave for pixel editing on a logo. It was a long time ago and I don't remember it being pleasant(hours of work deleted by hitting the wrong button).

PhotoScape - Free, for the average to the the enthusiastic imager, a little short for the advanced.
Care needs to be taken when installing. The Installer offers "Browser Add-Ons"

Resize Image in PhotoScape.

Til a week ago I used Nikon ViewNX2, the free software that comes with Nikon cameras, almost exclusively. Last week it crashed one too many times (incompatibility with another install) so now I'm using Digital Photo Professional, the free software that comes with Canon cameras. I don't find I need or want to do a lot of editing on an image. The more I do, the less natural the image looks. I do a minimum amount of sharpening, adjust levels so everything I want to see is visible and not blown-out, and color levels to match what I see in-hand.

Occasionally the simple programs can't cut it. This happens if my sensor is dirty and I need to do spot removal, or if the image is too contrasty, has uneven illumination, or has too many blown-out or dark details. For these images I resort to using Lightroom3. It has the features needed to fix these more difficult problems, but it doesn't have the other required features (like cropping). It also can do HDR, focus stacking, etc but I have not fully explored these capabilities.

For my focus stacking work I use Helicon Remote to do the captures, and Helicon Focus to do the stacking and 3D rendering.

For overlays and animations, I do the initial overlay/merging using Paint.net. If I do an animation with the images, I use ezgif.com/maker.

For adding notes to the images, or doing circle crops, I use PaintShopPro3 for Win95.

ACDSee Pro 8. Best I ever used.

I do two-step post-processing:

1) Final per-photo color temperature adjustment on each raw file, as needed, with Canon Digital Pro Professional (DPP). Then convert to TIFF with DPP.

2) Use Photoshop for cropping, levels adjustment, other adjustments (as needed), then downsize, and finally conversion to JPEG

Of course, Photoshop is going to a monthly subscription model, so I wouldn't recommended it now, unless you already have an old copy.

I use Paint Shop Pro 7 for most of my editing. I have Gimp, too, but I think Paint Shop Pro is much more user friendly.

I use primarily Adobe Photoshop. I really like that it has gone to a monthly subscription. You always have the newest version, and the monthly "rental" is very affordable IMO. $10/mo sure beats the every couple years $400-500 license for a disc copy of the software.

Although I'm glad it works for you, many of my friends in the graphics industry are not only up in arms, but have walked away from Adobe products forever over this. It is admittedly far cheaper than it used to be under the old system, but you don't own anything and you're dead in the water if you lose Internet signal. Further, it requires you to connect at least every 30 days to reconfirm itself, so you can't even go on vacation (for instance) without leaving your computer up and running on the Internet while you're gone.

And you have zero recourse if they feel like changing price or DRM (always connected, anyone?) in the future.

This is intolerable, especially when for our purposes it offers no advantage whatsoever to free software. And it still offers zero to Linux users, because (like every version of Photoshop, ever) it doesn't run on Linux.

And let's not even discuss the fact that Adobe leads the field by a wide margin in exploitable vulnerabilities. At another forum I patronize, catering to the IT demographic, they have a "Perpetual Yet Another Adobe Vulnerability" thread running continuously for the last 6 years so they can disseminate the newest vulnerability as quickly as possible.