RGdot

Tag: editor

  • Freeware, Useful Image Editor: PicEdit

    PicEdit is a useful image editor with a ribbon like menu.

    PicEdit

    It features the typical brightness, contrast, hue and saturation sliders to the left of its interface. Also on the left are the image effects mosaic, blur, sharpen, noise, invert, and grayscale. Canvas resize, rotate, copy, paste (from file or clipboard), watermark (image) and stamp (an extensible clipart library) are the other options available.

    Shapes such as polygon, rectangle, ellipse, arrow and line are also available along with others like fill and highlighted rectangular area. Each with their own relevant settings. For example if the line tool is chosen the options for thickness, opacity and style (dotted, solid, etc.) appear in the ribbon-like menu.

    Text and balloon text are also available in different styles but as may be obvious in the image it is not clear how to apply or finish inserting them on an image.

    PicEdit has a restore button that acts as multiple undos to reset the image to its initial state. However this didn’t work when I applied several random lines to an image.

    PicEdit does not write to the system registry and should run on Windows XP and newer.

  • PearlMountain Image Converter Giveaway

    PearlMountain Technology have provided a giveaway in time for mother’s day. Comment below to win a copy of PearlMountain Image Converter, worth $29.90!

    PearlMountain Image Converter is an all in one solution for working with images. It does more than just batch image conversions.

    PearlMountain Image Converter

    The workflow is similar to other PearlMountain software. Images are added individually, several from a folder or via URL. The left hand side of the interface lists the program features. The first is the conversion itself, formats supported here are jpg, gif, bmp, pdf, tga, tiff, psd, pcx,  ico and many more listed on http://www.batchimageconverter.com/image-formats/index.html. It is possible to preserve exif or iptc metadata when processing conversions.

    The second set of features is the resize option. Here the usual by size, by percentage, custom and dpi resolution is possible. There are also presets for best fits on devices like iPhone, Sony PSP and others. Additionally there is a resample setting and the option to switch width and height to match image orientations.

    Image or text watermark is next with all the flexibility of positioning the watermark. These include alignment, rotation, opacity, offset, shadow, edge, font and more.

    The rename option is equally flexible with many options for the renaming. These include having file date, exif and other file info in the output file name.

    Corrections has the brightness, contrast, saturation and sharpen/blur sliders.

    Border can add borders along the images with varying thickness and in advanced mode the border can be applied to any of top, right, bottom and left sides of the image leaving the other sides borderless.

    Crop features more advanced options. Automatic crop cuts the images in preset sizes and manual mode cuts images by percentage.

    The final step is to optionally change the output folder and then click the large Start button. A profile can be saved to re-use the same chosen options later. PearlMountain Image Converter works on Windows 2000 and newer and offers to add itself to the context menu as well. One minor oddity is that it required a reboot after install on a XP machine but it also used the browser to open a thank you page at the same time.

     

  • PhoXo: Freeware Mini Photoshop

    PhoXo (Version: 7.1 tested) is a lightweight but capable photo or image editor. It packs a good set of features into its 4MB download. One of the ways the developer describes it is that is a  ‘mini Photoshop’ and that is not far from the truth.

    PhoXo

    Going through its menus it is easy to see that PhoXo is  easily adequate for most uses.

    The Select menu features all, none and invert selections and options for selecting with rounded corners and expanding, shrinking a selection.

    The Image menu has the brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, color tone (like sepia), black white (like grayscale), glow, self portrait (like old photo) plus options for gamma, different color palettes and auto levels. There is also size, adjust border, auto trim, flip, mirror, rotate. Finally soft edge, shadow, blur and sharpness effects are here as well.

    Effects has the filters which include the usual noise, emboss, posterize, bulge, twist, wave, ripple, sunshine, glass tile, blinds, solarize, threshold, halftone, grid and the video effect, among others.

    Tools menu’s interesting feature is create an ascii image and a batch watermark tool.

    PhoXo also includes a clipart collection and frame library to add to images. Other tools available  – again much like Photoshop – are magic wand, shape, color picker, clone, stamp, gradient fill and others. The website has many tutorials and an additional library for use with PhoXo.

    PhoXo is freeware and available in 11 languages. It runs on Windows XP and newer.

  • Easy Photo Effects At Your Fingertips

    Easy Photo Effects (Version: 2.0 as of this post) is a photo or image editor that presents all its settings or features in one screen, a departure from the usual or traditional design. It is very easy to work with, however the undo function – named ‘reset image’ – is somewhat less user friendly in that it asks for confirmation every time and as implied by its reset name is not a step by step undo, all applied effects are undone at once.

    Easy Photo Effects

    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: Interesting Notepad Alternative

    Notepad Enhanced is a text editor, it does not have many outstanding features as it basically aims to be a better version of Windows’ own notepad. It supports file associations but that can be done within Windows as well. The main reason for it to be called ‘enhanced’ is its tabbed interface.

    Notepad Enhanced

    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.

  • Freeware Shorts: PixBuilder Studio (Image Editor)

    PixBuilder Studio (Version: 2.1.1 as of this post) is a capable image editor. It has many features of those much more expensive than it.

    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.

    PixBuilder Studio
    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.

  • Freeware Shorts: WildBit Viewer (Image Viewer)

    WildBit Viewer (Version: 5.9 as of this post) is an image viewer complete with support for many image formats. Its interface is divided into a explorer type tree, a file list and the thumbnail or single image view.

    WildBit Viewer

    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

    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.

  • Freeware Shorts: RealWorld Paint (Image Editor)

    Over two years ago I reviewed RealWorld Paint.COM and was impressed. Recently the author released a major update (Version: 2011.1) with a slightly changed name (RealWorld Paint). Once again he sought advice at the DonationCoder forums 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.

    RealWorld Paint

    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.

  • Freeware Shorts: Kestrel GX (Photo Editor And Organizer)

    Kestrel GX (Version: 1.2.1 as of this post) is an attractive photo editor that also helps organize photos into one or more databases. It supports many image formats including JPG and others but also Photoshop’s PSD format and RAW formats. Photos can be arranged into PDF albums to share easily with others. The usual edits like resize, rotate, flip, convert, remove red eye, saturation, rename and others are available but Kestrel GX lets you choose an external application (File —> Open In External Editor) for editing images.

    Kestrel GX

    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.

  • Freeware Shorts: Imagina

    Imagina

    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