I know there are a couple workarounds for this but I was hoping a direct solution exists.
I am looking for an image editor (like Photoshop but hopefully free software) which can be used to edit GeoTIFFs without removing their georeferencing information upon saving/exporting the edited file. I know that I can create a .TFW file to avoid this problem, but I'd like to avoid creating an extra file and would prefer to keep them as GeoTIFFs (.TIFF images with the georeferencing information embedded in them).
I've tried the GIMP, PhotoFiltre, LazPaint, and Paint.NET, none of them save the TIFF's georeferencing data when saving the edited image.
Best Answer
There are two programs using the libgeotiff library that will let you export and import georeferencing info from GeoTIFFs (and other image file formats): listgeo for saving the georeferencing info into a file, and geotifcp for writing the info from that file back to the image file after it's been edited. Downloads for the libgeotiff library can be found here: http://download.osgeo.org/geotiff/libgeotiff/, the two utilities you'll need are in this particular file.