PhotoFiltre
Photo editing apps tend to come in two flavors: free with a painful to use interface for all but the most basic tasks or fee with a marginally better interface for all but the most basic tasks. (Before you write to tell me how many things Irfanview can do, I love the app for what it's good at, but doing any of the heavy lifting involves a ridiculous learn curve and an abysmal interface.) PhotoFiltre spans that gap by offering a full-featured image editing suite. The app sports almost as many features as commercial packages like Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop Elements, without a price tag. All the basics are here like clone brush, paint brush, text tools, cropping, color correction, etc. PhotoFiltre also includes batch processing for a wide range of filters, sizing tweaks, transformations, and a handful of other operations. The interface is reasonably intuitive, handles basic tasks like a champ and delves into advanced photo editing in a way that makes photo editing seem almost painless. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]