Desktop | Images and Art |
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This category has spawned probably the largest quantity of software available ever. Some are good, some bad, some brilliant. We cannot cover all titles, but here is a selection of the ones we use ourselves regularly...
XNView. Primarily known as a very good picture browser, underneath it has some image editing tools. We prefer to use other software for editing, but you cannot beat XNView as a general picture organiser. PhotoFiltre. Rapidly becoming a very popular download worldwide - it rivals some of the top commercial packages. As a picture editor it is very easy to use yet works very professionally while keeping the interface simple. Very highly recommended for anyone working with photographs. Pixia. A Japanese program for editing photos, but is available in English too. Quite a complex set of facilities, but for an advanced user it is very useful. For example, if you need to work with 'layers' Pixia can do this while PhotoFiltre doesn't. Pixia is very popular among the Japanese for creating the 'animes' they are famous for. Anim8or. An excellent program for creating 3d rendered animations. Quite easy to use compared with some others, and while others often concentrate on creating static 3d images Anim8or has a lot more capability for the animation itself. Give it a try! Blender. One of the original 3d rendering programs, which became open-source and is still actively developed. It is definitely not for amateurs, but if you want to create something like in the top animated movies, you'll be astounded what Blender can do. Wax / Wink / Winmorph. Three programs available from the same author, all of which are very good quality. Wax is a full-blown video creation/edit program. Wink is a unique tool for creating animated tutorials. Winmorph creates morphing (gradual changing from one image to another) and has been used for the opening credits of a major movie. FontMagic. A nice program for those who want 3d text but don't want a large program such as Xara. Quite simple, but FontMagic does do the job adequately. Imaginate. Sometimes you just want a quick instant view of photo files within the current directory. Imaginate is great for this. It simply shows the current picture full size, and you either walk through the others or just press ESC to come out of it. Very lightweight but has many options including the ability to 'tile' image displays. Unfortunately it doesn't work with gifs, but its stability makes up for that when working with photo images. PhototoSketch. A lot of image editors includes filters such as 'find edges', and sometimes describe this as 'create pencil drawing', but they do tend to create something that almost could be a bit like a drawing if you stretched your imagination. On the other hand, PhototoSketch is dedicated to this one function, so does a much better job of it. In fact some of the results can be very good indeed. LightArtist. A specialised program for adding one or more light sources and shadows to your photos. You can change the colors and intensity of each light to create some very nice effects. |
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