Video editing isn’t just for Hollywood. In fact, with a decent camera and good editing software, you can create something that looks a lot more like a Hollywood blockbuster than your childhood home videos. Here are the very best video editors for home users.

VideoPad Video Editor

Free video editors have a tendency to be either simple to use and limited in terms of features, or powerful and time-consuming to learn. VideoPad Video Editor does an excellent job of avoiding both pitfalls – a powerful editor that you can easily navigate, even if you’ve never used anything similar in the past.

VSDC Free Video Editor

VSDC Free Video Editor provides a huge array of effects and filters to enhance your footage, with both wizards and manual options to suit beginners or more advanced users. VSDC is highly capable, and can yield superb results. As a non-linear editor, it works in rather a different way to many other similar tools, letting you position  clips and other elements on the timeline wherever you like and edit them there.

Avidemux

Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports various file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs.

VirtualDub

VirtualDub is a powerful free video editing software for Windows with many amazing features, such as compression, video splitting, and the addition of audio tracks. As a free movie editing software, it has batch-processing capabilities for dealing with large numbers of files and can be extended with third-party video filters.

Lightworks

Lightworks is described as the professional video editor for everyone, and we reckon that’s a fair summary. Despite its power, it will run well on fairly modest hardware, and it handles video capture and advanced editing with aplomb.

There are many reasons why you might want to record your screen rather than take a screenshot. Sometimes a still image of a Windows app isn’t enough and what you really want is a video showing the on-screen action. A screenshot is the equivalent of a photo, but recording a video your screen can better help to explain to someone how to fix a problem when you’re offering technical support, or you might want to make videos for YouTube. You might want to record a gaming session and share it with friends, or something else entirely. 

Camtasia

Camtasia is a powerful screen recorder tool that makes it easy to record what’s happening on your PC, convert the results into a polished presentation, then share it with the world. As well as recording applications, you can also use it to record games. If you make tutorials, you can highlight the mouse pointer and clicks, as well as easily zooming into an area of the screen to make it easier to follow what you’re doing.

Bandicam

Bandicam is an easy-to-use recorder capable of capturing a specific area or the full screen. It lets you easily record flash games, streaming videos and more. The software offers several modes like gaming mode, screen recording mode and device recording mode for perfect recording.

Icecream screen recorder

Icecream Screen Recorder can record the entire computer screen or specific parts of the screen. With the software, you can record video calls or conferences, game plays, etc. via its intuitive and user-friendly interface. You can draw on screen as you record, too.

SnagIt 

SnagIt 13 is a big update on previous versions of the screen capture software. It’s made by the same company as Camtasia, and even though it’s primarily a screenshot tool, it can now record and edit video.

Screencast-O-Matic

Screencast-O-Matic records your computer’s audio and video and lets you edit the area of your screen that you want to record. With the free version you can only record 15 minutes of video, and sticks a Screen-O-Matic watermark on your videos. You can publish your videos in MP4, AVI and FLV formats as well as automatically upload them to YouTube.

.

We’re taking and sharing more photos than ever, but even the most skilled photographer is likely to produce a dud or two, and even the best shot straight out of your phone camera could stand to be better. So a photo editing software is a must have. 

There’s no doubt that Adobe Photoshop remains, hands down, the best photo-editing software on the market. But unless you’ve undergone formal training, Photoshop proves a difficult program to master, and is expensive to use. Today I will introduce several free useful photo editing software.

GIMP

GIMP is a fully loaded image editing software. Whether it’s basic editing or advanced functionality, GIMP can handle everything. It has a customizable interface, and the functions are separated into multiple modules that can be shown/hidden individually shown/hidden as per need.

Paint.NET

Paint.NET‘s simplicity is one of its key features; it leaves it a fast, easy to operate free photo editor that’s perfect for those little tasks that don’t need the sheer power of GIMP.

PhotoScape

PhotoScape might look like a rather simple free photo editor, but take a look at its main menu and you’ll find a wealth of features: raw conversion, photo splitting and merging, animated GIF creation, and even a rather odd function with which you can print lined, graph or sheet music paper.

FastStone Image Viewer

FastStone Image Viewer can fully handle everything from basic editing to semi-advanced operations. Not only that, FastStone Image Viewer also comes with image management features, such as tags, and drag-and-drop copy/moves support. You can create slideshows with over 150 transition effects, and even acquire images from scanners. 

Fotor

Fotor is a photo enhancer first and foremost, more than it is a photo editor; if there’s specific area of retouching you need doing with, say, the clone brush or healing tool, you’re out of luck. But it includes a stack of high-end filters that really do shine.