Each effect comes with its own settings button to control transparency, thickness, contrast, colors, editable night and sepia colors, preset and arbitrary resize and others that belong to the effect being used. These Easy Photo Effects effects or features are as follows: Black & White, Sepia, Brightness, Contrast, Topaza (yellow, blue mix), Movie, Night Vision, Embossed, Analogica (horizontal and vertical vignette), Borders, Colored Grid, Tilt Shift, Resize and Rotate/Flip. The image above has analogica and colored grid applied to it.

Easy Photo Effects is true to its name and a good lightweight freeware alternative for fast image manipulation. It is a single executable file and runs on XP and newer versions of Windows.

Notepad Enhanced does have a few additional features and they are contained within panels, activated using the View menu. The Document Info Panel has the word, charater and sentence count. The Preference Panel houses the program settings which among others lets the user choose how the program opens, with new blank tab or not, and also if more than one instance of Notepad Enhanced can be opened at the same time. The File View Panel is a bit more interesting or unusual though perhaps not so useful. Here Notepad Enhanced scans local drives, ‘common places’ or Windows’ recent files to load a list of text files it finds. This can be filtered and is presumably a part of the program to ease the search for files to edit.

Notepad Enhanced requires the .NET Framework, is open source and is a simple addition to the list of many freeware text editors.

PixBuilder Studio’s features include the typical brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, color balance, auto levels, (background and foreground) fill and more but also support for layers (including rasterize and combine), gradients, masks and even more that elevates it to Photoshop levels. Transform, flip, drop shadow and filters like Gaussian blur, sharpness, emboss and dithering are worth mentioning in terms of the Photoshop comparisons but it doesn’t end there.

Its tools are also numerous. They are pencil, line, brush (configurable type and sizes), eraser, healing brush, clone stamp, ellipse, rounded rectangle, eyedropper, 8BF plugin support and more. The select menu has many of the options one would expect. Lasso, magic wand and magnetic lasso make image and layer manipulation easy and convenient. Color selection and range make working with specific colors within images easier as well.

The browser panel (Tools—>Browser Panel) eases navigation, a full screen mode (View—>Full screen mode) cleans up the interface, Rulers (View—>Show Rulers) aid in image creation and sizing, multiple undo covers up mistakes, Palettes add many coloring modes and options.

Much like its expensive counterpart and lookalike there is also web preview for JPG, GIF and PNG formats. It can read JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, PCX, PSD, TGA, ICO and PBS formats and save to all except PSD. PixBuilder Studio is optionally installed in portable mode and requires Windows XP or newer.

WildBit Viewer supports EXIF data and formats like the usual JPG, PNG, GIF, RAW and others but also Photoshop formats like PSD. The thumbnail viewer can be configured to show different sized thumbnails, sorted by name, size and date and any image meta data such as the aforementioned EXIF. There is also the image histogram and zoom via scrolling and geo information for viewing images using Google maps. Not forgetting animated GIF support and the ability to export image info to CSV files.

Via the Add Button button or by dragging folders to the ‘shell toolbar’ at the bottom of the interface favorite folders can be saved for future use. WildBit Viewer also has image compare – two images side by side – and slideshows with many transition effects. Images can be set as wallpaper and edited (Tools —> Editor) as well. The editing features include most of the usual in rotate, flip, adjust, transform, remove red eye, annotate (add text or shape), acquire (from scanner), filter (lens, morph, etc.) and some more.

Search is another noteworthy feature (see image below). Files within folders and optionally its subfolders can be searched by type (when Enable Filters is checked), name, location, date, size, attribute, EXIF, IPTC or XMP data. Note that the Filename text box must not be empty so use “*.*” (without the quotes) at least to start a search.

WildBit Viewer works on Windows 2000 and newer and is available in both portable and installer downloads. It is free for personal use. A pro version with multimedia support and a profile switcher is available as well.

This new version has several new features, some of which are listed below that make RealWorld Paint even better and probably even more complete that is required for most users.

The features are: Support layers with styles (individual layers can be filtered with the likes of blur, rotate and more and even worked on with Photoshop tools. This is followed naturally by Photoshop (.psd) format support and a few other formats too. More tools are added that include lasso and liquify. Additional command line support is explained here. An interesting animation tool (Create—>Create Animation) is also new which splits an image into rows and columns which then creates a sort of filmstrip animation with the divided parts of the image.

RealWorld Paint is available in a portable format as well.

Kestrel GX is perhaps mostly useful as a photo organizer. Not only it can be used to edit and search EXIF, IPTC and even GPS data associated with images but it can also be used divide images by rating, category and keywords and store them into their own database(s) managed by the program to view and also search for later.

Kestrel GX has print capability that includes a few ways or templates to print and also a slideshow (View —> Slideshow) with 163 transition effects. To top it all of it does both image and text watermarks (File —> Watermark Images) too. Kestrel GX is one of the most complete photo applications out there and is free for personal and educational use only. It requires Windows XP and up.

Imagina (Version: A 1.7 build as of this post) calls itself the next generation image viewer and editing tool or ‘virtual lightbox’. Its interface features the Microsoft Office style ribbon. Images can be opened using the camera icon in the top left corner and then any one folder viewed in one of several ways. One viewing method is the 3D effect, an attractive if somewhat CPU intensive way of navigating image folders.
Imagina also features such tools as noise reduction, support for tags, flip, resize and straighten among others. A ‘period style’ feature is a slightly enhanced sepia and black and white effect. Imagina also does a bit more than usual in the colour editing department in terms of its brightness, hue and saturation controls.
As image viewers go Imagina is more advanced and does a bit more than one might expect. Look for its additional features including playing movies at http://www.planetimagina.com/about.html

Dolphin Text Editor Menu (Version: 2.7 as of this post) is an enhancement and efficiency tool that works with most text editors and browser text areas such as MS Word, gmail, forum reply text areas, most if not all text editors and more. It applies or adds formatting, sorting, aligning, reversing and lots more to any text being worked on. Some examples of its features are remove blank lines, align text, append text – this adds text to the end of each line – convert to plain text, word count and get file names – this copies file names of selected files into the clipboard – and many more.
Dolphin Text Editor Menu sits in the tray and works in addition or in conjunction with the text editor or browser. The default keys to launch it are Ctrl+Numpad0.

DesyEdit (Version: 3.5 as of this post) is a tabbed text editor. It also features syntax highlighting for HTML, C++, SQL, XML, PHP and others. Additionally it includes FTP support to work with documents within DesyEdit and HEX and column editing as well.
DesyEdit becomes even more useful with its bookmarks, macros recording, case, tab and space conversions, full screen mode and print preview capabilities. It can also ‘print all open windows’, stay on top and open documents in read only mode.
DesyEdit is worth a consideration when looking for freeware editors.

DocPad (Version:10.0 as of this post) is a text editor and an enhanced alternative to Notepad. Beside the typical plain text editing it offers the following and more.
Adding or removing indentations. Bookmarking specific lines. Jumping to a specific line. Removing extra spaces. Converting case. Converting between formats like Base-64, UTF-7 and others. Dragging and dropping files or chunks of text. Spell checking.
DocPad has built in calculator, calendar and character map tools as well.