photo tweaking software for a beginner?

[mike]

I use (and love) lightroom for tweaking and organising my pics. 

A friend has just got a digital camera and doesnt want to spend money on the software part, any suggestions for what he should be using to do simple stuff like crop / edit curves / colour temp / etc ? 

Not sure if he's PC or mac.

[David Martin]

Win10 built in photo editor will do much of this to a basic level. Full curves are not there but the rest is to a sufficient extent to tweak colour temp/saturation/exposure, crop/rotate.

[Jaded]

Photos should do this on a Mac.

[LEE]

I wouldn't describe editing curves as simple stuff really.

[Wombat]

Wot Lee said...

Tweaking curves isn't really beginner stuff, and I think you'd struggle to find a beginner (i.e. free) software that does that (or does GIMP, which is not really simple at all?)

I used to love Lightroom, but it rapidly became obvious that I was at risk of dying of old age whilst waiting for it to process a batch of photos.  It struggles desperately with large image files, and its refusal to use more than one processor is a pain.  I went to Capture One Pro, which is designed to cope with Phase One's 100MP raw files.  not free, but very affordable for Sony users.

[fuaran]

Yes, Gimp can do curves, but its not exactly simple.

For something a bit more like Lightroom, could try RawTherapee. Its more of a RAW processing tool, though you can use it with JPEGs if you want. It can do a lot of stuff, though may take a while to figure out.

Or maybe Darktable if on Linux/Mac OS.

[LEE]

PAINT.net gets good reviews and it's not a PC resource hog.
Not sure if it handles RAW files directly (if they aren't using RAW then why not?)

Anyway I'd probably recommend starting the learning curve with GIMP rather than learning a basic editor and have to relearn something else (Hopefully they have RAW image software with their camera, like Canon's CameraRAW).

Doing the simple stuff is normally the same in any editor, you can simply ignore the advanced options for a while.

99% of the time I do the same 10 or so things in Photoshop/CameraRAW and never touch the other million things it could do.