Hi guys,
I am crazy about making videos for my friends. Could anyone tell me some good photo editing tools and where to get them for free or at least trail versions so that I can make my videos effectively
(NOTE: I will use windows OS for this purpose.....)

Thanks in advance.....

Photo or video editing software you need? What exactly do you want to do - DVD, edit movie, picture...?

You can check videohelp.com forum with a lot of free and trial software for editing video.

If you mean 'photo' as in photographs, there's an excellent tool - lightzone
http://www.lightcrafts.com/lightzone/
Unfortunately, it's not free of charge any more. You can download a monthly trial version.
If you make photos in raw (eg. .nef), that piece of software is dog's bollocks (ie. very good)

I do actually mean a photo editing tool.... Actually I follow picassa to edit photos.

The GIMP's pretty good.

GIMP, of course!

Yep, I would use GIMP for photo editing and enhancement.

I didn't know that GIMP have windows version too

You va try IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com/) for basic editing. It is very fast also.

Check this link too
http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pix...eephotoedw.htm

GIMP most certainly has Windows versions. Can't say if they're always as up-to-date as the Linux version, but they're there.

Although Gimp is a very powerful and versatile tool (having a way more capabilities than I'll ever need), I use it more for website photo editing. I tried to use it to process raw photos that I often take but it was kind of cumbersome to use.
A few years ago I came across lightzone (I mentioned it above). Back then it was still free of charge for linux.
It turned out to be an excellent piece of software for RAW photos (the key here is 'raw' - it's pretty useless when it comes to compressed formats like .jpeg, .gif, etc.) It's very intuitive and has a wide range of ready-made templates that can be the basis for further modification. Furthermore, its users contribute their templates on the lighzone forum.
At some point there were a lot of complaints on lighzone forums that the linux version was behind its windows (commercial) counterpart so LZ developers faced a dilemma either to stop developing a linux version or to make it a commercial product and to develop it properly in line with the windows version. They chose the latter.

I guess LZ and gimp are completely different programs. LZ is targeted at amateur and (semi-?)professional photographers who need to process their raw data. Although it lacks any other functions, it's extremely efficient in what it's supposed to do. GIMP, on the other hand, is a swiss army knife type of program that will be of great help in a wide range of scenarios.

One other, very different thing, is ImageMagick. It's a suite of command-line tools. What it's good for is batch processing, and especially batch resizing and file format conversion. Of course you'll want some basic BASH scripting to go with it. A hundred images to resize for the website? Mind numbing tedium doing it interactively in a GUI program; with Bash and ImageMagick it's a few commands then fire and forget.

guys,
as I already mentioned that I am using only windows for this photo editing I want you to post replies about windows only. Also please mention whether the tools are able to edit my photos with different font text(may be in different languages), image overlapping(photos with some image as background), etc.,.

Thanking for your replies.....

Sorry, I didn't notice that you've edited your original post.
As you posted it on a LINUX forum, one'd assume that we're talking about linux

Window$ only ? Search google, don't tell me you can't find anything.

How about Photoshop?

I don't understand the question about fonts. Most photos are in a pixel (AKA bit-mapped, or various other terms) format, and you cannot change the fonts used in text.

If you have a file in something like Photoshop or GIMP and it still hass all the layers, then you can change fonts.

But perhaps you mean adding text. The better editors will all do that.

What photo software have you tried?