I'm surprised to be the first one to submit this. ImageJ is software for scientific image analysis. It was developed at NIH and enjoys wide support in the scientific community. But it has many features, that should make it also useful for general image/photo processing tasks (e.g. I'm not aware of a freeware photo editor, that supports 16-bit TIF). It's written in Java, but is entirely self-contained, as it can be downloaded bundled with JRE (installing Java is NOT required!). Can be found here:
http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/
There are also hundreds of plugins available, that greatly enhance the capabilities of the program.
ImageJ [Java image analyzer]
Re: ImageJ - image analysis
Update here: still in development 15 years later, now at v1.53 and there's quite the changelog: https://imagej.nih.gov/ij/notes.html
Mirror: https://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedi ... ageJ.shtml
EDIT: I tried using the muCommander trick viewtopic.php?p=29743#p29743 to make the program portable, but it appears to write to C:\Users\USERNAME\.imagej\ anyhow
Mirror: https://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedi ... ageJ.shtml
EDIT: I tried using the muCommander trick viewtopic.php?p=29743#p29743 to make the program portable, but it appears to write to C:\Users\USERNAME\.imagej\ anyhow