Quick fix for bad camera phone pictures

Have you ever had a photo op but didn’t have a decent camera handy and had to resort to your camera phone? Pictures are often grainy, hazy, or too dark under suboptimal conditions. Fortunately, there are numerous free photo editors you can download to salvage those pictures. While most editors provide options to manually fine-tune your pictures (which require some time and experience), some also give you the option to automatically improve picture quality dramatically. Below is a comparison of quick auto-enhancing features of 5 free photo editors. Below are links to download them.

MAGIX Photo Clinic 4.5
Paint.NET
Picasa2
VCW VicMan’s Photo Editor
XnView v1.94.2 Standard

Below is a picture I took on a warm, sunny day at the beach. But it’s hard to appreciate that from this picture taken from a Blackberry Curve. Its camera was set to highest resolution and image quality. With a few clicks of the mouse, I was able to transform the dark, grainy photo into one that’s quite spectacular.

Blackberry Curve (original)

MAGIX Photo Clinic 4.5 (Image→Auto color, Auto contrast).

Paint.NET (Adjustments→Auto Level).

Picasa2 (I’m feeling lucky).

VCW VicMan’s Photo Editor (Effects→Color→Auto color correction).

XnView v1.94.2 Standard (Image Map→Automatic levels, Automatic contrast).

All five were easy to install and use and provide many of the advanced photo editing capabilities similar to ones found in Adobe Photoshop. But of the five , MAGIX Photo Clinic and Picasa2 improved the quality of the pictures the best, adjusting most accurately the color of the sky, clouds, water, structures, and rocks that day. A bonus for Picasa2 is that it also incorporates a great, easy to use photo album.