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Tag: editor

  • Pictor Is An Image Editor With Unique Features

    Pictor (v 1.27.0) is an interesting image editor that while basic looking has some not often seen features.

    Of these more unique features are 36 predefined collage shapes that arrange 2 to 25 images in different configurations. Plus a whole set of shapes (geometric, stars, arrows etc.) that can be added to images. Perhaps more unusual is the crop and erase features where an image can be cropped using a shape instead of a rectangular crop. Free hand cropping is also a less common option. In the screenshot below Crop —> Crop by shape is chosen and drawn on the image. After drawing the shape clicking enter crops the image leaving only the parts of the image within the triangular shape. The Erase option does the opposite by erasing a (triangular) shape and leaving the rest of the image intact. The crop has a few more options as well with one being crop by text whereby a typed text remains with the the rest of the image cropped.

    The Add menu adds text and other images to the existing image. This feature includes a ‘Text Circle’ option where the text entered is drawn in a within a resizable circle, a less configurable feature of something seen in the likes of Photoshop. The Replace option is like overlaying the open image with another.

    Pictor also does batch (resize, rotate, add image, etc) processing plus the expected gamma, brightness, grayscale, negative, emboss and others under the Color menu. It also features various pens for drawing on images with various thicknesses.

    An important limitation seems to be that the program supports only one Undo level and further changes are therefore destructive.

    Pictor is portable and less than 3MB unzipped. It supports most standard set of image formats including the likes of EJPG, WebP and PGM.

  • Seymour: Portable Freeware Image Viewer

    Seymour

    Seymour (version:0.9.10) is a freeware image viewer with basic editing features, it is also portable.

    Seymour is one of the newer entries in the image viewing world and it packs a good number of features in a lightweight download and shares similarities with XnView.

    Images can be rated, categorized and tagged and a separate pane is available to view and find categorized images. Files can be grouped or filtered by filename, those tagged or not and those categorized or not and folders can be bookmarked too.

    Beyond viewing many formats and moving and copying them there are basic editing features like resize, crop, rotate, grayscale, brightness, hue, auto level and format conversion to name a few. Seymour also supports scripts with some included like listing of images ready to copy into the clipboard, saving views or layouts, moving files based on properties and replacing text in file names and extensions.

    One additional features is Search for images online (under Tools menu or right click the image) which uses google images to find similar images, this is in addition to the local Find similar images which will filter and display similar images in the current folder.

    The program does feel sluggish at times, especially in the preview pane (see screenshot for one example of two images being overlayed after one is clicked after the other) but also the menu structure, for example List artists is under both File and Scripts menus.

    Seymour is sqlite based and works on Windows XP and newer and supports touchscreen gestures.

  • (Un)colored Is A Modern Text Editor

    (Un)colored

    (Un)colored (version: 0.9.1) is a cross platform open source freeware or donationware text editor. It is currently tagged as beta.

    It provides a distraction free interface with a toolbar or menu only becoming visible when the user hovers near the top of the window. It also features shortcuts to type or move through a document like Ctrl+1 for a XL header type text and Ctrl+Shift+C to clear formatting. A list of the shortcuts can be seen via the top menu.

    (Un)colored-AV

    Selecting any text will also highlight the toolbar to format the text. Clicking Alt is the alternative method of doing the same.

    What makes (Un)colored more modern is support for emojis and its embed feature. Youtube, SoundCloud and others can be embedded directly into a document.

    A document can be saved in HTML  or markdown format. The former supports themes, as in the saved HTML document can have different font sizes or colors. Currently there are four themes, Attitude, GitHub Style, Horizon and White Room.

    As the author warns that (Un)colored can trigger antivirus warning, it did so on the Windows 10 machine it was tested on. Avast Virus Lab analyzed and returned a false positive (see screenshot). The more people use it the less likely this will happen in the future.

    It is available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows 7 (installer or portable) or newer and only in 64-bit format.

  • PhotoDemon Is A Full Featured Image Editor

    PhotoDemon

    PhotoDemon is a portable and relatively small – less than 17MB unzipped – image editor which happens to be open source too. Most, if not all, features expected when working with images are present here. Plus there is also a Batch process mode available via the File menu (or Ctrl+B). A film strip area shows all open images.

    PhotoDemon can import directly from the clipboard, cameras and scanners and also from URLs. Mouse and keyboard shortcuts for zoom make it easy to view details. The Image menu features most of what is expected like Resize, Crop, Rotate, and Flip plus a few others like Count unique colours and Transparency. The latter is a bit different because it can make specific colours transparent and leave other parts of an image untouched.

    The selection has some interesting extras. When making a selection various effects can be added to the selection instead of the whole image. For example the screenshot above, probably not the best image to illustrate this, shows a rectangular selection with a border (After making a selection click Select –>Border). The Adjustment options are Black and white, Brightness and contrast, Color Balance, Levels, Vibrance, White balance, Channel, Color, Histogram, Invert, Lighting and Monochrome. The Effects are also most of the typical ones expected like Artistic, Blur, Distort, Edge, Experimental, Natural, Noise, Sharpen and Stylize. There is also a Custom filter window which is a fun to play with if not necessarily needed for most. The Experimental and Natural filters include the likes of Underwater, Rainbow, Alien and Radioactive.

    The Tools menu is where macros can be recorded and plugins added, the included plugins are Exiftool, pngnq-s9, EZTwain, zlib and FreeImage. PhottoDemon offers a good solution for image editing beyond what is mentioned above and probably belongs high on the list of downloads to keep.

  • Gwennel Doc : Freeware Notebook

    Gwennel

    Gwennel Doc is a notebook that is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and supports the odt open document file format.

    Start by creating a new notebook, save it with a name and start typing. It is possible to just leave it at that, type, insert images, tables and links and have notes that are portable using the aforementioned xml based standard format.

    However it is also possible to define presets or styles to use to format the notes. Either through the Format menu or by right clicking any one of Text, Paragraph, Bullets and Numbering and Table different fonts, colors, margins, line spaces, table widths and other styles can be defined for use in a notebook. These new styles will be available in the toolbar drop down menus for text, paragraph and bullets.

    The default font used by the program is Tahoma but if a style is created to with another font for text then it can applied to any part of the notebook. Right click Text —> New Style and choose the font. Start typing and apply the style to it by highlighting text and choosing the style from the toolbar drop down. The same can be done to a paragraph for its font, alignment, background color, line spacing, border, and indentation. Bullets and Numbering can have number or bullet styles, different spacing, alignment and others (see image below). Similarly a table’s border, width, margin, cell colors (including alternating colors) can be saved as a style and applied via the Table —> Insert Table menu.

    Gwennel

    Gwennel Doc (version: 0.14) is portable and very lightweight, a few sample styles are available as a separate download but the main download comes with a sample and documentation that can serve as a reference itself.

     

  • Notepas: Multiplatform Text Editor

    Notepas

    Notepas is a multiplatform free text editor with some advanced features. It is feature filled and mostly aimed at programmers. Most features are available docked by using the corresponding menu or button to make the options visible on the left hand side of the program interface. It supports several highlighters for different languages. Notepas is a solid option at version 0.9.23 and can do a lot, a few of its features are listed below.

    It has several levels of code folding, the 0 button that has a drop down to 9  folds code several child or inner nodes making it very easy to view a document’s hierarchy. Code filter under Tools can search for specific strings and show only lines containing it. Code Shaper also under Tools can do some advanced text filtering by adding a comma after a string of code, trimming space, removing line breaks and more. One simple example is adding line breaks. In the first screenshot one part of the sample XML snippet is highlighted, when breaks lines before </firstname> is applied it is converted to the form in the second screenshot. Of course this example is meaningless but is one trivial example of the kind of things Notepas is capable of.

    The selection menu has options to to toggle case of selected text, convert tabs to space, strip first characters, strip markup, add comment code and other text manipulations based on the word or characters in the selection.

    Notepas

    The program’s settings window (Settings—>Settings) is mainly for customizing the appearance of the code such as colors, character spacing and other highlight options. There is an option to increase font size or stay on top or restrict Notepas to one instance as well.

    Notepas is available in portable download for both 32bit and 64bit systems as well as Linux machines.

  • ImBatch Version 2.0 Released

    ImBatch

    ImBatch is one of the better rated freeware image editors. As its name and tagline imply it makes it easy to work on a number of images. This latest version 2.0 adds to its power with a folder monitor, what it calls ImageMonitor, and a ContextMenuEditor. These new features can be accessed from the Tools menu. The first makes it easier to automatically work on images added to any chosen folder and the second makes it easy to apply ‘tasks’ or edit images via a right click.

    Both of the new features work by reading a .bsv file. The .bsv file is created by adding tasks in the program’s main interface and saving them using the big save button. Then in the  ImageMonitor and/or ContextMenuEditor loading and setting the saved .bsv file.

    imbatch2

    ImBatch has some of the more common and useful filters and edits for images. These include rotate, resize, shadow, crop, flip, round corners, remove exif, shift time, gaussian blur, 3D effect, watermark, color balance, rename and more.

    It supports 100+ image format, some read only, and it has a few command line parameters too. It runs on Windows 2000 and newer.

     

  • iPhotoDraw: Freeware Image Annotations

    iPhotoDraw (Version: 1.6 Build 4837) is a freeware image editor. Its main feature or purpose is to make it easy to add objects to images.

    iPhotoDraw

    Open an image and the ruler is on by default, optionally add grids and guidelines from the View menu to be able to place objects more accurately. Beside adding text  iPhotoDraw features all kinds of shapes. Shapes can be arrows, dimension lines, straight lines, arcs, curves, circles, rectangles, callouts and virtually any type of polygon. Polygons can be simple like a triangle or not like an ‘explosion’ or a 32 point star. Using the Polygon tool one can create any random shape by clicking (end of) line points and double clicking to finish.  There is also pixelation and blur tools that can be rectangular, oval or polygon shaped.

    Any shape or image will have its own properties, accessed via right click or double click. These include adding text to them, aligning them, adding fill color, changing opacity or line thickness, among others. Drag the mouse over several objects and they can be grouped so they move together for example.

    Objects or annotations added are flattened into one image when it is exported. Simple saving a file doesn’t destroy the original. Unlimited undo is available to make it even easier to play with an image.  iPhotoDraw requires the .Net Framework 3.0 and runs on XP and newer.

  • pViewer: Another Minimalist Image Viewer

    pViewer (Version: 1.6) is a minimalist open source image viewer. It has no menu and little distraction.

    pViewer

    pViewer’s options are available via right click and there are keyboard shortcuts for its features. These features are Send To Dropbox Public folder, rename, slideshow, rotate, flip, resize and read exif data. It supports effects such as invert, grayscale, sharpen, blur, brightness, contrast, tint, black border, white border and red eye correction. Additionally there is support for .zip, .rar, .cbz, .cbr archives with Manga and Comic mode displaying two images side by side.

    The batch operations – resize, rotate, convert, rename, grayscale, invert white or back border – work on all images in the current directory and sometimes even without any additional prompts. For example Add White Border just goes to work and creates a subfolder containing the output.

    pViewer

    The program settings has options for drawing and text color and fonts. These are not accessible via the right and looking at the keyboard shortcuts one sees the following

    Crop: Ctrl+Click to make a selection, release the mouse button while still pressing Ctrl. Writing on the image: press Shift+Click on the picture to add text, write what you want, move it wherever you want with the mouse, press Ctrl+Enter.
    Drawing a rectangle: Alt+Click and drag to draw, then you can save the edited image. Filling the rectangle: After drawing a rectangle you can fill it with the same color by pressing TAB

    It is less than 1MB unzipped, doesn’t require installation and should run on Windows XP and newer.
    Thanks to commenter andy for pointing out that it requires the .NET framework 4.0

  • Saint Paint Studio: Simple Freeware Image Editor

    Saint Paint Studio (Version: 18.0) is a freeware image editor. It offers many features that are comparable paid or shareware image editors. Input formats supported include bmp, jpg, gif, ico, cur, png, pcx, tiff, tga, wbmp, sps (its own native format) and perhaps interestingly avi.

    Saint Paint Studio

    The program toolbars offer the mostly standard like red-eye filter, blur, sharpen, gamma, emboss, dilate and others but with a few additions like the Symmetry Pattern that, for example, applies the Spray tool to symmetrical positions on an image with one click or drag – remember to press the Symmetry Pattern button before applying the Spray (see image)

    Paste image from clipboard, gif animation, a color palette that can be navigated through using the keyboard and reordered by RGB values, light to dark and dark to light colors are some of the other features of the program.  Various brushes can be constructed freehand and then resized, deformed, continuously applied by single clicks, rotated and converted to frames for animation. It is also possible to grab a whole image to use as a brush to apply on another.

    Saint Paint Studio also features layer and print support. It should work on all Windows versions.