I’ve been using Graphic Workshop for several years now – so much so that I purchased it a while back. It’s become a bit dated, however, and won’t let me apply some of the special effects I’d like – such as red eye reduction for use with digital camera pictures. Also, I’m not a fan of the newest version – which doesn’t appear to offer much more than the old version, and which I’d have to pay for again.

I’ve also been using PhotoPlus, and had purchased it also – but I got my copy some time ago, so I only have version 8, not 11 which is the latest. It, too, was useful, but, ironically, was missing some of the things I liked about Graphic Workshop – namely bulk resizing, conversion, and so on.

Just last night I stumbled upon FastStone Image Viewer, a freeware graphics viewer which combines the best of both of the above, and is, I believe, actually better overall – at least for my purposes. PhotoPlus does let you create pictures, unlike FastStone which only applys effects to existing pictures, however I hardly ever need to do that and, when I do, I can just use the native Windows Paint program.

(If I ever need to do something fancier, I can always download the free Gimp – something I’ve installed on and off over the years but have never kept on my system because I almost never need to use something as advanced as it, even though it’s excellent for what it does.)

I will always prefer freeware (and open source software) to anything I could buy – especially if its quality is comparable, as this piece of software is. I heartily recommend it, and it’s now found its place in the list of software links on the left-hand side of my home page. It replaces the previous PhotoFiltre that I’d had there.

Something else interesting is that it also has an excellent contact sheet wizard – which means that it edges out the still good Cas, from Zhorn Software, as my contact sheet utility of choice. This frees up another “spot” on my software link section, as I’ve removed that link too.