Which photo editing software is the easiest to use?

Don’t immediately rule out free alternatives.

Ease of use is subjective. However, since you have Photoshop on the list, I am surprised that GIMP was not mentioned.

Personally, most of my photo work is merely color balancing and lighting adjustment, so I use XnView for most of my image editing.

@jerv

GIMP is great, but I wouldn’t call it easy to use.

For Mac OS, not Windows. Correct?

@Ivan The same could be said of Photoshop.

Try paint.net first. It’s free, it’s open source, it’s all-platform.

Seashore is a great place to start for basic photo editing. It’s free and open source.

If you want to try something more complicated, I would suggest GIMP as a free option. Aperture and Lightroom are both excellent choices as well. Both have strong online resources and communities to help you get started.

(I’m assuming you’re talking about Mac OSX since you mentioned Aperture..)

@dpworkin

If, by all-platform you mean Windows-only.

Oh, really? I thought in was win, mac and linux. Sorry for the misinformation.

I use PhotoShop because it’s the most powerful of all the tools available, but for ease of use and intuitive interface, I’ve always been a fan of Corel PhotoPaint.

really depends on what you need. If you are just adjusting photographs I would go with Aperture, its easy and works well. Lightroom is quite similar but a little bulkier and trickier to get into.

If you plan to do any graphical design stuff along with photo editing go with Photoshop, there are plenty of tutorials to get going with it online.

I think an awesome photo editing software is picnik,the user interface is easy and simple though there are a whole zoo of features,you will learn to use it easily and quickly and you don’t need to download anything it is online!!
here’s the link,try it now! http://www.picnik.com/

I consider myself highly skilled in the works of Photoshop (CS4)... and I can tell you if you DO go this route, the first time you open it you’re gonna have probably one of the biggest WTF moments of ‘10… but you will pick up on it and it becomes REALLY easy (like everything else in the world).

Uhm, for me, I got into computer graphic design around 2004, started out with Macromedia Fireworks. Since Adobe formats all of their programs similarly, I picked up on Photoshop in less than an hour, haha! One program that is a B!*TCH to learn is Flash, but that isn’t really a photo editing software so I’m going to shut up now as I am sliding off topic! ;-)!

@omglykhi To say that Flash is a bitch is an understatement :P

Photofiltre is a great, free alternative. I use it all the time. It’s user-friendly and well designed. There are even quite a few free plug-ins available.

hey, what system are you using, win or mac?
there’s certain photo editing programs that allows you edit photos on win or mac, and I know one great photo editing software that runs both on win and mac : http://www.arcsoft.com/photostudio/