Free or inexpensice photo editor

[haakoo]

Gary, maybe the free for personal use, installable/portable program XNviewMP , is something to look at.
https://www.xnview.com/en/xnviewmp/

[gwpriester]

haakoo - Perfect. Grayscale and TIFF with transparency. That's all I need.

Steve - Affinity would be perfect as well except I just need a simple straightforward way to do these two functions.

[behzad]

Try this, photoshop clone.
https://www.photopea.com/

[gwpriester]

How do you save to your computer from Photopea? Oh, never mind, it seems to have saved to my desktop. Better solution because it can also do RGB to CMYK conversion.

[handrawn]

haakoo - Perfect. Grayscale and TIFF with transparency. That's all I need.

Steve - Affinity would be perfect as well except I just need a simple straightforward way to do these two functions.

sure gary, if xnview does the one task you need

when you install it though, be careful it does not take over image management tasks you use other programs for

[handrawn]

don't know photopea; there are a lot of online converters though to choose from

[behzad]

Photopea does what photoshop does for general use which I think is fab.

[handrawn]

thanks, I'll check it out

[gwpriester]

I ran into one issue with XnViewMP. The TIFF with alpha transparency I converted from a PNG transparency works fine in Pro+, but when I sent it to my editor who is on Mac the background came in as black. So I think there may be some Mac v Windows issues. Photopea's conversions worked fine.

However, Photopea does not have the ability to create Grayscale images. XnViewMP does have this ability. BUT cannot change modes to CMYK. So, until I have a greater need for something like Affinity, I'll use both.

[gwpriester]

Update: I had to do some serious photo conversions for our Japanese stereogram publisher, 30 CMYK and 30 Grayscale hi res images.

I purchased Affinity Photo and it was worth every penny. I dragged and dropped all 30 RGB color images onto the screen, then one by one File > Export or (Shift + Ctrl + Alt +S) and then Export. Ctrl W to close and move to the next image.

Then I loaded the 30 black and white images and because Designer Pro+ still lacks the most basic ability to export true grayscale, I changed the setting to TIFF Grayscale 16-bit and saved those files.

It was fast and intuitive and took less than 15 minutes.

The final upload folder with the CMYK and Grayscale images was a hair over 300MB which I uploaded to Japan in 3 minutes and 45 seconds.

The Export Settings is so simple and elegant.