Video / photo editing software

[obi]

I'm looking for a free software / freeware (I would prefer free software, as in freedom) video editing program, but I know absolutely nothing about them. I have Windows Vista and GNU / Linux.

I really only have one requirement. I have a bunch of photos of me, and I want the software to be able to find something distinctive (my eyes) and stick them in the same spot of the picture, thus centering my head, correcting for camera tilt, and adjusting minor differences in size. This would allow me to create a time lapse video of myself over the past year.

I am aware of one program that can do this:

I use Adobe After Effects Pro to create the animation and align the eyes. It has a wonderful image stabilization plug-in that makes the alignment a breeze.

I don't want to use an Adobe program if I can avoid it. Especially not this one. It's over 1 GiB in size and has a price tag of $999 (heh). My understanding is that Blender is an open source competitor to After Effects, but it seems to be more a 3D CGI kind of thing, so I don't even know if it would do what I want.

 

[SpadeMan]

This:

http://www.paint.net

Dont let the name put you off, its nothing like MS Paint.
Kinda a cheaper version of Photoshop but meh its free.
Just visit the site and follow the prompts

 

[crabnebula]

I would suggest GIMP as it is one of the most popular free image editors available.

 

[DanielG]

I think that there is an online application that is pretty much like photoshop

 

[obi]

Have you checked if any of these applications can do what I want? If so, how? I know that GIMP especially can have a confusing interface, and I don't want to spend several hours going through menus / guides trying to find what I want to do.

 

[crabnebula]

I really only have one requirement. I have a bunch of photos of me, and I want the software to be able to find something distinctive (my eyes) and stick them in the same spot of the picture, thus centering my head, correcting for camera tilt, and adjusting minor differences in size. This would allow me to create a time lapse video of myself over the past year.

Going by the features it can do the bolded part, not sure about the first part though.

Also, you could try their irc channel at irc://irc.gimp.org/#gimp-users.

 

[art-of-tennis]

Have you checked if any of these applications can do what I want? If so, how? I know that GIMP especially can have a confusing interface, and I don't want to spend several hours going through menus / guides trying to find what I want to do.

If you have any experience in image editing, you'll find gimp pretty easy to learn. The only real confusing thing to it is their layering system is weird. It might have been changed in the upgrade though, because I use 2.6.

 

[cyberzero]

I'd second Paint.NET, and as for video editing, there really isn't much that is good and free. Pinnacle Videospin is probably a good free competitor to Windows Movie Maker and has a few features that you may find useful, but other than that, I can't think of much.

 

[Pirika]

Have you checked if any of these applications can do what I want? If so, how? I know that GIMP especially can have a confusing interface, and I don't want to spend several hours going through menus / guides trying to find what I want to do.

I don't think GIMP interface confusing, it's quite similar to photoshop menus. But probaly you wil have to spend some time looking for plugins for things like image establization.