For those who enjoy using drawing and painting software but require an open source program for a tablet or digitizer, you might want to check into the features of MyPaint. This program supports pressure sensitive graphics tablets and is configured for artists that want to concentrate on their creations as opposed to being distracted by the program.

MyPaint means that you can create freehand drawings on a graphics tablet with a surprising selection of digital paint brushes. You’re able to toggle the paintbrush utility windows with shortcuts and also make your own brushes. The user interface stays put in the background where it is easy to get at it if you need it but you can still work without it intruding. The graphical user interface for manipulating layers features a layer dialogue, making it easier to use. Because it has unlimited basic layer support you never need to resize the canvas.

MyPaint has a big lay out of configuration and brush creation choices. The palette has a lot of options and distinct features like autogeneration of colors and shades. The brush collection includes ink, charcoal, pencil and smudge; the brush engine lets you experiment with your own brushes in addition to supplying tilt support for better control. If there’s a brush you like that isn’t included you’re able to import it or export one to another application.

There are 35 brushes in each group. There are 3 especially created artist brush sets and 2 non-artist brush groups, the classic and the experimental. It can save your creations in OpenRaster (.ora) or export it to JPG or PNG.

MyPaint supports ten languages and It has a quick-start tutorial.

Check out further information and download at http://wiki.mypaint.info/Main_Page

There are situations where you had a nicely taken picture, with all the wonderful smiles of you and your family or friends. Everything is perfect except for unnecessary views that distract the whole picture; a passing stranger on the back might be accidentally caught or a garbage bin right beside you. Before thinking of cutting the picture and scanning it again, there’s a program that can remove unnecessary portions of your picture and retain the most important part.

PhotoWipe is a program for removing or cleaning your pictures from unnecessary views or objects found in your favorite or precious photos. This software does only what it does best; remove unnecessary portions of your pictures.

The program only performs simple functions so it does not require any sophisticated hardware and software to perform better. Pentium III or higher processor, 256MB RAM and 10MB free disk space are enough to run the program to its full potential.

Simple but comprehensive, that’s how to describe the graphical user interface of the program. The workspace for editing images is very large and a smaller navigation window is provided to have a view on what part of the original image you are editing. The interface makes the program is very easy to use.

As mentioned, the program only performs what it does best and that is to remove unwanted portions of your favorite pictures. After you open the image, you are now ready to erase whatever portion you wanted to by using the eraser tool that’s included in the program. You’ve got plenty of brushes to choose from when you erase; dot (in different sizes), box, polygon and curves.

It also provides a real time view of the result of the edit. The edited portion can be viewed with a facsimile of the exact result of the erasure process. However, the result may differ depending on the size of the deleted portion etc.

PhotoWipe is the software you need to get rid of those unnecessary portions of your most treasured pictures. No matter what type of user you are; advanced or beginner, you can utilize the program’s full benefits. In addition you can have these at no cost at all as the program is free to use!

You can download PhotoWipe and see some amazing examples here

Most photo and image editing software available today offers incredible tools for enhancing your photo quality; from simple editing of the brightness and color and cropping the image, to more complex tasks like combining multiple images through layers and applying gradients to improve color quality. Often this kind of software comes with endless features you’ll never need to use. If you only need the basics for editing your photos, you don’t need to purchase such expensive tools; ImageEnhancer offers the basic photo editing tools without any costs on your part.

This program provides you the basic tools you need to edit your photos and other images. As a matter of fact, ImageEnhancer only features basic photo editing tools and nothing else. Basic tools mentioned here include brightness, color and contrast adjustments, adding blur in your photos, crop image to change its dimension, image rotation, and reduce the noise content of your photo. Aside from these tools, it supports a variety of image file formats like JPEG, GIF, BMP and many more. You can also set your output to any of those mentioned file formats. Other features like photo slideshow, interactive multi-threading for image slideshows, and removal of red eye can also be utilized using this program.

First of its cons is its user interface, specifically the display of the photo being edited. it only provides a small view of the picture (about 1/8 of the whole window), icons being used were dubious, and the overall design of its user interface is poor. However you are allowed to view edited photo full screen. Other bad thing is that it would take about 3 to 5 seconds before you can see the result of your edit (after to click the preview button). It may take a bit of time before you can get used to the interface but there’s no problem as far as performance is concerned.

All in all, ImageEnhancer is a good image editing software for those users who only needs simple editing of photos. You’ll get used to the user interface after using it a few times. Let’s just hope that the next version will focus on user interface improvements.

More information and the download available at the official homepage

Greenshot is a screenshot utility, supporting numerous image types, for saving part or all of your screen as an image file.

This utility requires only a small amount of memory, a real positive over similar programs that can really hog your memory. Hotkeys keep it uncomplicated and you are able to get at an options menu with a simple right click. You can opt to capture just the visible window, a part of it or the full screen. When you capture the image the editor will just about instantly open and let you add text boxes or shapes such as boxes, arrows etc, to your image. Then you can save it in your image format of choice or send it to a printer.

The area to be captured turns green, this helps you in making sure you’ve selected the right area. As the program captures the image, it makes a sound like a camera’s shutter.

It also has hotkey support, to make things even more convenient, and also some other things can be customized to your liking.

Greenshot is a little utility, fast to download and effective without unneeded bells and whistles. It serves its purpose well without excessively burdening your computer. So if you’re looking for an image capturing tool, you might wanna try this out.

Visit the homepage

If you deal with images a lot, this relatively fast and lightweight program called Imagewalker can be very useful in helping you organize and process them.

You can quickly find, sort, edit, view, print and share your images all from within Imagewalker. It also includes a fullscreen slideshow mode, useful for showing off those vacation photos when you have friends over. It lets you automatically scan for image information such as date taken, camera information, etc, as well as your own info such as keywords. It includes batch processing options to save time when manipulating or printing multiple images. It also has batch uploading to flickr, as well as the ability to create image galleries for use on your own website.

All this in an application that’s lightweight enough to run well even on slower computers. ImageWalker has an unlimited trial period with no obligations but if you continue to use ImageWalker it may be good karma to register it! One Registration currently costs US $20.00.

Click here for additional info at the Imagewalker homepage.

IMC2008 is a digital photography software. It contains image viewer, screen capture, comparer, retouch, photo album and compression tools.

Pros: Image compressor comes with a comprehensive set of tools that include import, capture, scan, retouch, compare, create photo album, share and compress facilities in one.

The basic facility of compression does not require the user to make a trade off between file size and quality. The application compresses the image as best as possible for optimum quality and a reasonable size. Viewing of images has a wide range of formats that include RAW formats of many popular camera makers; Canon’s CR2 CRW, Nikon’s NEF, Kodak’s DCR and Olympus’s ORF. Photo formats supported include image file types JPEG, JPEG2000, TIFF, GIF, PNG besides the RAW formats supported.

The additional but really useful functions include professional viewer, image comparison tools, retouching tool, screen capture, image grab from the net, EXIF data editor, photoshop filter plug-ins, web photo album creation and conversion/export to multi-page PDF, animated GIF, multi-page TIFF, PowerPoint and Word.

The comprehensive user interface with a large set of features that include such functions as screen capture or image capture from the net makes for a comprehensive tool for the graphics artist. The interface is simple enough to be useful for the learner yet has enough power to be useful for a professional.

The functionality of all the extra features offered are well integrated into the application. For example capturing images from the net or creating web photo albums do not require the user to come out of the application. Application settings, screen layouts, file associations, photoshop filters or web album are parameters that can be changed for setting up a configuration suitable for you.

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Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced Adobe Photoshop Express public beta, a free Rich Internet Application (RIA) available to anyone who wants to store, sort and show off digital photos with eye-catching effects. During the public beta period, Adobe will solicit Photoshop Express user feedback on product features and functionality, which will continue to evolve over time. As the newest addition to the Photoshop family line, Photoshop Express has taken much of Adobe’s best image editing technology and made it simple and accessible to a new online audience. Photoshop Express allows users to store up to 2 gigabytes of images online for free, make edits to their photos, and share them online in creative ways, including downloading and uploading photos from popular social networking sites like Facebook.

“Photoshop is trusted technology that has changed the visual landscape of our world. Now, Photoshop Express allows anyone who snaps a digital photo to easily achieve the high-impact results for which Adobe is known,” said Doug Mack, vice president of Consumer and Hosted Solutions at Adobe. “Photoshop Express is a convenient, single destination where you can store, edit and share photos whether you’re at home, school or on the road.”

With Photoshop Express, digital photos can be uploaded and sorted anytime, edited non-destructively to always preserve the original image, and shared from anywhere, on any Web browser. In a few easy clicks, Photoshop Express empowers anyone to make standard edits, such as removing blemishes and red-eye, converting to black and white, cropping and resizing, and much more.

No experience is required to add special effects that will impress friends and family. In keeping with its one-click approach, Photoshop Express offers tricks like Pop Color which selects an object in an image, mutes the background color of the photo and allows the user to swap the object’s color so it jumps off the page. Sketch effects help photos look like drawings and the Distort feature allows you to distort facial features or objects within the images for a comical or artistic effect. Even users with limited photo editing knowledge can simply select what looks best from a line-up of sample photos with visual hints showing different variations of the added effect.

Photoshop Express offers a variety of creative sharing options, including uploading and showing off photos and slideshows in your own online “Gallery” hosted by Adobe, or conveniently embedding or linking photos to social networking sites and personal blogs without having to leave the application. Slideshows never looked better with animation that makes photos float and fly across the screen, allowing for viewer interactivity and unique presentation styles.

Adobe Photoshop Express beta is available now for free via any Web browser right here.

Batch It! Pro is an automated Batch Imaging Editor which allows photo operations such as resize, rename, rotate, create thumbnail galleries and add captions. It supports image of 22 image formats including PSP, PCD, PSD, JPG, JPEG 2000, PNG, GIF, TIFF, PCX and more.

Pros: With the digital cameras of today it is easy to shoot a pile of large photographs. Cameras assign them names in a mechanically determined series. Trying to lodge them in a web album or to send the batch to someone for their viewing usually requires resizing these as a minimum. There could be a need for some editing too. Batch It! Pro is an automated Batch Imaging Editor which allows you to resize, rename, rotate, create thumbnail galleries, add captions and more for this kind of a photo batch.

BatchIt! handles a lot of formats it can load or store in. It can load JPEG,JPEG 2000, BMP, TIFF, PCX, PNG, TGA, PBM, PGM, PPM, GIF, VDA, ICB, VST, PIX, WMF, FAX, PSD, PDD, PSP, CUT and PCD formats and Save in JPEG, JPEG 2000, BMP, TIFF, PCX, PNG, TGA, PBM, PGM, PPM and GIF formats.

Batch up/down sizing of photos with aspect ration locking or without is possible. Adding watermark or copyright notices and text captions are equally easy too. Transparency of the watermark can be controlled. HTML based file directory listing, thumbnail listing, slide show for local or web display are part of the features the application has. A auto run CD of the slide show can be created with equal ease.

Individual photos in a batch can have specific rotation, flip and or crop specified. Individual edit in terms of contrast, brightness, hue and saturation also is possible. Renaming them is another feature available. The parameter settings can be saved as a profile and used again with a similar batch process when required.

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