Hornil Stylepix - Advanced free Image Editor

From the website:

"Hornil StylePix has (an) intuitive user interface. It is designed to adjust the selected feature easy and conveniently. Even if you have no experience, you can easily learn how to edit image and retouching your photos. As a result, Hornil StylePix's intuitive UI reduces your time to work.

To better speed editing, Hornil StylePix is ... light and powerful. Hornil StylePix runs on fewer resources environment such as Net-books and laptop computer or virtual machines(vmware, virtual box, virtual pc and etc.) with full image handling features. We are always striving to improve the performance of Hornil StylePix."

As I recall, this used to be shareware. The learning curve is a little steep, but not much more than Photofiltre or Paint.net. It has plenty of tools. The fancy tool pickers/sliders can be hidden by sliding them to the left. Simple operations like adjusting brightness and contrast took a while to find the first time. There seems to be keyboard shortcuts for a lot of things. For example, the left and right braces ([]) adjust line and brush width. Online help is good.

Available as an .exe or portable. OS requirements - Windows XP to 7. Hardware requirements are pretty minimal.

http://www.hornil.com/en/produ...../stylepix/ (Korean website)