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Tag: image

PicPick Tools Is The All In One Design Tool

PicPick is described by its author as

PicPick is an all-in-one software for software developers, graphic designers and home user

and it packs a punch in a 942KB zipped download (an installer is available as well).
Unzipping and running PicPick opens an initial window that writes to an .ini file. Here one chooses one of the many translations available, set it to start with Windows if needed and configure hotkeys for many of its operations. After that PicPick sits in the system tray and its every tool is a right click away.

Whiteboard is a tool that uses the monitor space itself and is basically what it says. Using shapes, lines, arrows one can draw anything freehand and save the whole area which includes the desktop background. The Whiteboard also includes a screen magnifier. Show CrossHair displays the cursor position in x and y pixels on the screen. The interesting feature of this tool is that by clicking on one of point on the screen and then moving the mouse subsequent x,y positions are shown relative to the clicked point.
Show Protractor, as its name suggests, uses reference points created by mouse clicks and movement to measure angles on the screen. Show Pixel Ruler allows vertical and horizontal screen measurements, right clicking on it brings up its options which in the case also includes the ability to change its transparency to be able to use it as unobtrusively as possible. Show Magnifier enlarges areas the mouse is hovering on between 2x to 10x.

The color options includes Show Color Palette that acts as a reference for RGB, C++, Delphi and HTML color codes. With Open Color Picker colors are chosen and saved into the Color History where they can be saved in any of the aforementioned formats using the Copy Color As.

Capture Settings sets the output type (to PicPick itself, to clipboard and others), the image format of the output (JPG, BMP and others) and includes support dual monitors and auto scroll to capture whole pages like those that are not fully visible on the screen and have scrollbars. Subsequent to choosing the settings a whole range of capture possibilities are included in Screen Capture. Those include active window, fullscreen, region, freehand and what is called window control that captures the aforementioned whole page. As interesting and useful as PicPick is perhaps the best part is that even at that small download it also includes an image editor with all the usual features one may needs. Invert color, blur, rotate, crop, zoom, draw shapes and many more are all here.

An ongoing poll is running on the developer’s message board to vote for additional languages the program would be available in. PicPick is a very useful and lightweight image tool well worth a download.

May 13, 2009
JetPhoto Lets You Manage Your Images

JetPhoto Studio is described by its author as

JetPhoto Studio is a feature-rich and easy-to-use digital photo software

With JetPhoto it is possible to organize photos into albums, and to archive and back them up as well. One can browse collections or albums in the usual thumbnail mode where not only it is also possible to add notes or tags to individual images or collections of images but it is also possible to star or favorite selected ones, view them by date either utilizing the file creation/modification information or EXIF details. Double clicking on individual photos takes the user to an (almost) full screen mode with some of the expected effects and tools included. Images can be made into a wallpaper or a screensaver, sepia effect can be added, the image can be cropped and watermark added just to mention a few.

One of the negatives of the concept of JetPhoto is that when it creates its albums it actually copies or replicates the photos. Perhaps it is possible to choose the album location (prompted when first creating it) to be in the same, originating folder that your images reside in but I did not test that possibility. Another unexpected behaviour or bug is that the magnifier did not always work in my usage, the icon did change to a magnifying glass one when the image was loaded into the full screen mode but actions -clicking and holding the mouse- had very little or no effect on the portion of the image the focus was on and even then that depended on the actual image size. A look at the program’s features pages explains

You can place your mouse pointer on an interesting part of a photo, press and hold the mouse button to reveal a magnifier which magnifies the image with actual pixels at full size of the original photo.

so perhaps this is not actually a full blown magnifier in the true sense of the word or is it?

JetPhoto makes it easy to search an album or across albums and besides the normal search criteria there are possibilities of searching photos by location if the photos have that info attached to them. To do that JetPhoto can connect to a map server to allow the geotagging of photos or to connect to google maps and generate KML or KMZ files for use with Google Earth.

JetPhoto adds a few attractive output options (see image) but some are either crippled by bearing the JetPhoto text in one frame (in the web flash gallery for example) and/or limits on the number of times they can be used to create an output. A PhotoJet server can be setup to store images online on any webspace using the program itself as a management interface. This is available as a sort of alternative to flickr, which the program itself also supports. JetPhoto runs on Windows 2000, Windows XP and Vista. A Mac OS X version is also available.

May 6, 2009
RealWorld Paint.COM The Complete Image Editor

A relative unknown amongst the image editing freeware choices RealWorld Paint.COM is a surprisingly powerful and useful application. It is described by its author simply as

Web-graphic-master’s tool of choice

RealWorld Paint.COM makes it easy, barring the advanced functions used by

true graphics professionals, to scale the heights of the standard Photoshop. RealWorld Paint.COM is more than sufficient for most purposes. On launch the options are to create a new raster image, open an existing image, capture the desktop or open the clipboard stored image.
Going through the program one finds the usual requirements in crop, cut, zoom, rotate, mirror but also grid of various sizes that can be superimposed on images to make working on regions easier. Other necessities like border, transparency, color and brightness adjustment and not to mention bevel, drop shadow, fill, border, blur are all present and so is a good text editor with features like gradient text effects. The ability to import, export and use masks can be useful for organizing image editing tasks. Of course it is also possible to create layers with various filters and effect and import or export them. Of some importance is the multiple undo and redo available. Perhaps more notably it is also possible to work with photoshop compatible 8bf plugins (see images) and the ability to define, using an included editor (see images), plugins via the use of javascript. One can also use one of the few available or the one already included that takes screenshots. Perhaps a more unique feature to RealWorld is that
by right clicking an image the user can define mouse gestures (up, down, cross, circle, arrow, hourglass and many more) to automate everything from saving a file to shifting its hue.

More details can be read, discovered and seen by using this less than 7MB download and checking the software author’s wiki. Resulting images can be saved in the usual formats like JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG and others called ‘Layered image files’ and ‘RealWorld image files’ for images to be worked on later while preserving layers and effects much like other porfessional editors allow. RealWorld Paint.COM is compatible with Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or 7 and is also available in a very convenient portable download. It is not to be confused with the better known PAINT.Net application however. On the DonationCoder forums RealWorld’s author explains the choice of the name in the following way

Yes, the Paint.COM name is controversial, a bit of a joke and something to counterweight the flood of .net apps. I am old school C++.

April 24, 2009
PhotoScape For All Your Image Editing Needs

PhotoScape is described by its author as

PhotoScape is the fun and easy photo editing software that enables you to fix and enhance photos.

The opening screen is an attractive and clear division of functions and features that can also be accessed in tab like fashion on the top of the screen. The program also displays random flickr images but this can be turned off.

The Viewer presents the well known explorer like interface with panes for navigation and preview. From there and via right click images can be set as wallpaper, become part of a slide show, rotated and double clicked to be viewed in full screen mode. In full screen mode a right click presents the aforementioned possibilities plus others like brighten, darken, zoom, and view EXIF info.
The Editor presents an ever growing number of filters. Most filters, and other effects, can accessed either via the accompanying drop down or by clicking on their respective buttons. They include the very impressive ‘Bloom’ and ‘Blacklight’ filters that give life and clarity to images. Here one can also resize an image, frame it, add line, objects and shapes onto it, apply a mosaic effect, apply free and preset crops, reduce red eye, and even reduce the appearance of moles. The Batch Editor can do all of the above on a set of images.
Page includes many templates to group a number of images into a page that can be saved. It is possible to drag and resize images to fit them within many sizes, mixes or shapes available. Frames and filters can be added as well to produce imaginative finished pages.

Combine is another form of the Page funtion described above. Here images can be grouped vertically or horizontally to produce a strip or multipage effect. Again many sizing and framing options are available here.
AniGif creates gif animations of course and with many required controls. Of course the delay between each animated frame can be controlled as well as the background color that fills any emtpy regions when the images are not exactly the same size. Additionally PhotoScape has 7 transition effects and crucially the ability to position images within the frames (center, top-right, etc.). The latter feature is important when the pictures are not the same exact dimensions and, when using some other animators, individual frames can be off relative to the next frame, but not with PhotoScape.
Print is sort of an extension of Page and includes various forms that let the user visualize different layouts and print images with configurable alignment, brightness and dots per inches (dpi). The finished product can also include such things as the file name under each image.
Splitter divides an image into different regions, be they configurable number of equal sized rows and columns or widths and heights.

Screen Capture, captures windows, full screens, rectangular regions and copies them to the clipboard or opens them in the Editor. It is also possible to repeat the last capture.
Color Picker provides the RGB or Hex value of any region via a zoomed and draggable ‘fountainpen’. PhotoScape also keeps a recent history of captured colors.
Raw Convertor, useful for DSLR camera images, converts raw formats (DNG, CRW, TIFF, etc) to the web friendly JPG. And finally Rename batch renames files with several renaming templates such as including the EXIF date, today’s date, numbered increments and others in the output file names.
PhotoScape, currently at v3.3, packs many features in a 14MB download and is one of the most complete freeware of any kind. It does not consume too much resources as it remained well under 40MB of RAM usage throughout extended use. As mentioned it is free, looking for donations, runs under all Windows from 98 to Vista, is actively developed and looking for translators as well.

April 20, 2009
Text File Stats & Watermark Images

Two GNU licensed freeware courtesy of Lune Rouge offer easy and lighweight means of achieving sometimes useful tasks.

Firs off line TextStat described simply as

Create statistics on a text file

Using it is as simple as browsing for a file and then clicking the “TS” icon. Using TextStat it is possible to analyze any text or HTML file and generate wide ranging info. Among others TextStat produces stats on the number of words and paragraphs to such things as number of carriage returns, number of occurances of every word and an estimate on the number of syllables. TextStat supports such options as exluding words and separators like question marks (see image below). The results can be viewed in the program itself, copied or exported into a text or HTML file. An additional tool is the calculation of the Flesch Reading Ease test or score which calculates the readability of the text based on the number of words and syllables per sentences and words respectively.

Next up is CopyrightLeft described as

…add a copyright on or below your images

Also GNU licensed, CopyrightLeft offers a no frills way to add watermarks to any image. It offers the needed options such as color, text position, rotation and transparency and even more (see image below). What makes this 799KB download even better is its batch processing. It is possible to force the output format of watermarked images, such as converting images to .jpg, and also one can create a HTML file with a linked listing to the said images. It has worked well for me except in one case. If the option to add ‘Shadow’ or ‘Glow’ is checked and the watermark text is rotated the shadow and glow remain at zero degrees and do not follow the text orientation. Sometimes, but not in all my tests, checking ‘Transparent background’, as if to hide the glow or shadow, solves this issue.

Both should work in all Windows versions.

February 18, 2009
Enware Freeware & Dirhtml Index.html Generator II

Shortly after I wrote about the dirhtml index.html generator I received an email from its developer. In part due to my confusion about the way the sorting options were presented and how the output listing was actually sorted Eric, the enware developer, had released a new, then beta, version. It has since gone out of beta and v4.833 presents a more intuitive sorting menu (see images below).

Older version of dirhtml

New version of dirhtml

In my opinion it is now easier to visualize the output because the ‘Unsorted’ option is now in a column with all the primary choices that determine the shape of the output.

Two notable omissions in the original article were that at the ‘Input/Output’ and final tab it is possible to create a batch file by clicking the ‘Save Batch File’ button or F7. This will generate a batch file and an associated .ini file. Launching the .bat will use the .ini file, containing all the settings that have been gathered by going through the program, and this will then immediately generate the required output. This is very useful as it makes subsequent uses much easier and faster. Also worth pointing out is the ‘div_recursive.txt’ script, one of the ‘Script’ choices in the initial ‘Folders, Files’ tab. This will generate an output with a recursive listing of the folders and files being worked on. It is a very useful way of presenting the results.

I also want to take this opportunity to write about the other freeware Eric is and has worked on.

First up is the Mp3 ImageMap. This is free for non-commercial purposes and portable. The developer, Eric, describes it as

…an attempt to bring back the shock value of music finding to people who know all their tunes and searches by heart, and incorporates a rather unique algorithm for dividing rectangles into N squares.

It works by the user specifying a folder (containing MP3 files for example), file extension(s)(MP3 and WMA for example), path to the output HTML file, image (GIF, JPG, JPEG or PNG) and choosing one of several sort types and then clicking ‘Build It’. The app will use the image to generate an image map with different areas linked to the different MP3 and WMA files. A nice and fun way to listen to music or simply launch files.

Next is the ScrapBook described as

ScrapBook is a freeware, unstructured database program that holds chunks of text.

A lightweight and only 252KB download, it is surprisingly useful. It is possible to save all sorts of text with the first line of the said text acting as an index. It is also possible to differentiate and separate different chunks by placing them in different ‘cards’. To navigate between cards one can, for example, use the left and right arrows or click Alt+L, F2. Even easier is finding text by using the ‘Find’ box. It is also possible to save shortcuts in ScrapBook and use it as a launcher by moving the cursor over the text or shortcut and clicking F12. One interesting feature is the ability to ‘tag’ cards, by clicking Ctrl+space, and therefore making an index or listing even more intuitive by then viewing a list of tags (Ctrl+T). As with dirhtml ScrapBook is filled with useful features.

Finally there is CopyDate, taking a further step in making tasks easier, described as

Copydate copies files, optionally inserting today’s date/time into the copied filename.

February 15, 2009