PhotoPad (2024)

Free versatile image editor

PhotoPad Photo Editing Software—or simply PhotoPad—is a free graphic design software that enables you to easily edit images. Developed by NCH Software, this multimedia program offers a wide variety of editing tools to help fix any photo issues and create the perfect image.

Similar to Pixillion Image Converter, PhotoPad can crop, resize, rotate, and flip image files. However, it features more image-editing functionalities as you can use it to retouch photos, apply various cool effects and filters, adjust the photo quality, and more. This program is free for home use. However, for commercial purposes, you’ll need the Pro version.

Is PhotoPad any good?

On its own, PhotoPad is a pretty comprehensive software already. Its core features include the ability to fix images—allowing you to resize, rotate, flip, crop, and add text and other images on your photos. Thus, it’s a suitable post-production image editor that’s comparable enough to the likes of Adobe Photoshop. It also offers the ability to apply filters, effects, handmade drawings, borders, backgrounds, censored mosaics, and more. Plus, you can create embroidery patterns from your images.

Its most powerful tools are its adjustment tools, however. Here, you can tweak the brightness and contrast of your photos, straighten images that look crooked with their horizon lines, and use Regional Effects to apply effects and filters to a selected area of your photo. You can also remove red eyes and blemishes on snapshots and combine several files into one HDR image. It has an extensive selection of powerful editing tools and dozens of effects to choose from so you can unleash your creative side.

This software supports numerous popular image formats such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, BMP, and RAW and can even edit photos directly from DSLR cameras. However, while it can recognize over 30 image formats, it can only save in 9 of them: namely, BMP, DDS, GIF, ICO, JPEG, PNG, PPP, PSD, and TIFF. Additionally, compared to the top programs of this industry, it can feel like it lacks some features.

Is PhotoPad Photo Editing free?

When you first launch PhotoPad, it will always open a smaller window that displays quick access functions. There are nine here: Open, Batch Edit, Collage, Panorama, Screenshot, Embroidery, Paint by Numbers, Video Tutorials, and Buy Now. “Embroidery” and “Paint by Numbers” are special features that let you turn images into craft patterns. There’s no built-in tutorial here, so video tutorials are the offered material. Meanwhile, the “Buy Now” option only shows if you’re using the free version. You can avail of either the Home Edition or the Pro Edition.

The taskbar contains 12 tabs: Menu, Home, Edit, Select, Color, Filters, Effects, Tools, Retouch, Share, Suite, and Custom. The first one is your main drop-down list and is where you can check out the Help section. The rest have their functions displayed on the ribbon taskbar as you switch between them. However, the last three tabs are different. “Share” is where you can easily upload your saved images—either through email, Twitter, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Flickr. Meanwhile, “Suite” is where you can access the rest of NCH Software’s products.

This is because this program can actually download and open the developer’s other applications right there in the program window—bypassing the official website entirely. Now, once you open up an image file, it will be displayed on the main work area, and applying any changes will open a right-side Effects and Layers panel that contains customizations you can tweak. Take note that clicking on a feature immediately applies it. You need to delete a layer or undo your last edit to cancel them.

Flexible for your needs

All in all, PhotoPad is a pretty powerful and versatile tool to have if you constantly work with photos or if you need a free and user-friendly graphic design software. While it doesn’t have a built-in tutorial or save files into more formats, it still has a wide variety of editing tools that are of great use, whatever your image-editing experience may be. This is a highly recommended program if you use other NCH Software applications, too.

Easily edit any digital photo and image with PhotoPad. Crop, resize, and enhance photos with powerful tools and effects.