Tag: photoshop

PhotoDemon Is A Full Featured Image Editor

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 … Read more

ToolWiz Pretty Photo: Fun, Feature-Packed Freeware Image Editor

ToolWiz Pretty Photo (Version: 1.5) is a freeware image editor with lots of features that place it very high when compared to other free, shareware and expensive editors.

ToolWiz Pretty Photo supports the more common picture formats and can also do screen captures. Screen captures, available from the File menu, are rectangular ones created with click and drag of the mouse. When an area is chosen a mini toolbar offers to save the capture, open or return to ToolWiz Pretty Photo’s window or add any of a collection of shapes, lines or text immediately.

ToolWiz Pretty Photo can merge layers, … Read more

LazPaint: Open Source Graphics Editor

LazPaint (Version: 4.8) is open source and is a good and very capable alternative to any full featured image or graphics editors. Some of its features are listed below using its menu as a reference and the images attached to this review highlight a few of them.

LazPaint can do multiple undo and redos and paste as and paste as new image. Selections are available as rectangle, ellipse and polygon, these are complemented with curve that can create complex shapes or areas based on initial and end points. Selections can be edited, rotated and there is also the magic wand … Read more

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.

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 … Read more

My ViewPad Is A Simple Graphics Viewer

My ViewPad (Version: 4.1.0 build 16212 tested) is a freeware image or graphics viewer that is also available for Mac and Linux. It supports over 100 formats, many of them both read and write. These include the common .jpg, .psd, .tiff, .raw, .ico and .gif formats to less common ones like .tga (Targa), .wmf (Windows Metafile), .pict, .psp (Paint Shop Pro) and others.

The interface is simple and straightforward. The image area includes right click support for Copy, Rename, Delete, Properties, and somehow oddly Open With and Preview. The latter two are for opening the images using another image viewer … Read more

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, … Read more

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 is perhaps mostly useful as a photo organizer. Not only it … Read more

Hornil StylePix: Feature Packed And Freeware Photoshop Alternative

Hornil StylePix is an impressive Photoshop replacement that is not only freeware but is only 1.5MB in size. The layout is similar to that of the expensive Adobe product. Not unlike other free Photoshop alternatives it supports a lot of the features or functions of the much bigger product and does them reasonably well.

Hornil StylePix’s features include the likes of lasso (free, polygonal and others and all with extra settings to increase, decrease, fill and generally work with the selected region), erase, spray and an easy way to draw shapes.

Walking through the program menu, the following are also … Read more

Who Needs Photoshop When You Can Have Fotografix!

Fotografix is very much a mini version of Photoshop with its similar menu structure and a good number of (perhaps more basic) features familiar to Photoshop users. It even supports Photoshop’s PSD image format and of course imports them with layers intact.

Looking at its menu Fotografix’s features are as follows:

The File menu contains the usual open, save and other operations with the addition of an icon extractor.

The Edit menu includes the likes of cut, paste, purge (current session’s history for example) and fill color with a choice of background and foreground colors plus black, white and gray.… Read more

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 … Read more