Today’s WordPress Wednesday we look back to through the month of January 2013 to see what was some of the cracking free WordPress themes.

As you can see down the bottom that the quality of the old standard free themes are improving to narrow the distance between free and premium theme. Down below are a small roundup of the 8 best releases of free WordPress themes.

1. Xenon

Xenon is a portfolio theme ideal for photography or design related websites. The theme is designed to function as a showcase for creative works or photographs with minimal distraction from other elements. The theme has features like, featured menu, featured thumbnail, custom background, theme options, widgetized sidebar etc.

The theme also comes with an option to customize its color scheme and link colors. You can set a color scheme of your choice via the live customization feature in wordpress.

2. Zoren

Zoren is a free responsive wordpress theme. The theme supports and adjusts itself to screen resolutions across various devices ranging from desktops, notebooks, tablets and down to mobile devices. The content and media on the site is responsive to provide hassle free view on all the devices. The theme supports custom menu, featured images, widgets, and theme option panel.

3. Gallery

The Gallery theme has been rewritten from the ground up to be faster and easier to personalize. As this theme is completely responsive, making it easy to showcase your grid of images, videos, quotes, blog posts, and more on any screen. Gallery has also been build around the power of SASS and Compass for you to cusomise your gallery theme with ease. Simply change a few color values and you have a completely different look!

4. Underfire

Underfire is a free premium WordPress theme for game, gadget related blogs. This is a stylish WordPress 3+ ready theme with features like custom menu, featured images, widgetized sidebar, and jQuery image slider on the homepage. Theme also comes with an option panel.

5. Viper

Viper is a free affiliate directory WordPress theme. This is a WordPress 3+ ready theme with features like custom menu, featured images, custom post type, custom taxonomy, and jQuery image slider on the custom homepage template. Theme also comes with an option panel.

6. Clean Retina

Clean Retina is a Simple, Clean and Responsive Retina Ready WordPress Theme which adapts automatically to your tablets and mobile devices. Along with the elegant design the theme is easily customizable with numerous theme options.

Some of the highlighted options are 9 home page layouts(corporate layout also included), 5 layouts for every post, featured slider to highlight your post, custom post type to show gallery, 11 social icons, webmaster tools, custom background, custom Header, custom menu, custom favicon, custom CSS, custom webclip icon and many more.

Also supports some of the popular plugins like Breadcrumb NavXT, WP-PageNavi and Contact Form 7.

7. Chun

A flexible-width CSS3 and HTML5 blogging and portfolio theme. It supports all post formats and has layout, font, and color options built into the theme customizer. The theme also supports the Custom Content Portfolio plugin, giving artists and other creative people the ability to share their work.

8. Portal

Portal is a very simple, magazine plus blog style theme with light bright colors blending nicely. With all the latest features such as Responsive layout, SEO Optimized, Custom Widgets and many more. Most of all, Portal is FREE