Is it comparable to Gimp or Adobe Photoshop? I honestly cannot say so and do not care the least. It allows me to do the image editing things that I need to do which are basic image manipulations, e.g. resizing, copying, pasting, and basic editing.

Paint.net 3.5 final was released today. Users who are interested in the changes in this release can take a look at the post over at the official blog to find out more about them. Those that do not care about that can download the latest version of the image editor from the developer’s website where it is available for all supported operating systems (Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7) and languages. Paint.net, as the name suggests, requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5 SP1.

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The Paint.Net developers have now announced the first beta of the upcoming Paint.Net 3.5. Users who are using a previous version of Paint.Net like the last official release Paint.Net 3.36 can update to the new beta from within the program. All that is needed is to click on the Check for Updates button under (Help). Paint.Net will by default only search for official release versions (which the beta is obviously not). A click on the options button in the window makes it possible to turn that feature off so that all versions of Paint.Net are considered for upgrades.

The changelog lists a few important changes and addition. Paint.Net 3.5 requires the Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 which should be beneficial to the program’s overall performance. This could become obvious when opening images on single cpu systems. Computer memory usage has been optimized when multiple images are loaded into the image editor. Startup performance and effect dialog responsiveness has been optimzed as well.

The full changelog:

* Now uses and requires .NET 3.5 SP1, which has many built-in performance improvements.
* New effect: Blurs -> Surface Blur, by Ed Harvey
* New effect: Distort -> Dents, by Ed Harvey
* New effect: Distort -> Crystalize, by Ed Harvey
* Effect dialog responsiveness has been greatly improved.
* Images open much faster, especially on single CPU systems.
* Selection outline is no longer animated. Instead of “dancing ants”, an antialiased and stippled “XOR” outline is drawn.
* Startup performance on most systems will be better by about 20%.
* Memory usage has been greatly reduced when more than one image is open.
* The font system for the Text tool has been completely rewritten, and problems with missing fonts and crashes should be a thing of the past.
* On Windows XP and Vista, the Text tool has improved text rendering quality (it uses GDI instead of GDI+).
* On Windows 7, the Text tool will use DirectWrite (instead of GDI) which gives even better performance and quality.
* The toolbar font list has improved usability, rendering quality, and significantly improved performance.
* The toolbar font list no longer requires an application restart to recognize newly installed fonts.
* When many fonts are installed, both memory usage and startup performance have been greatly improved.
* Installation prerequisites are now installed automatically, such as .NET Framework and Windows Installer.
* Updates can now be downloaded in the background, and installed automatically once you exit the application.
* General rendering quality has been improved when zoomed in.
* Added a “Utilities” menu. Updates, Languages, and Plugin Errors have been moved here.
* Added a “Manage Fonts” command to the Utilities menu.
* Clicking the middle mouse button on an image thumbnail will now close the image.
* Improved the Unfocus effect.
* The DirectDraw Surface (.DDS) file type now allows you to select the resampling algorithm for auto-generated mip-maps.
* A processor that supports SSE is now required (almost all CPUs purchased this decade satisfy this).
* Fixed an issue with Gaussian Blur and its treatment of alpha values.
* Fixed a crash with the “Units” selector in the toolbar.
* When zoomed in, it is now much easier to resize a very small selection.
* Now includes a Russian translation.

Paint.Net 3.5 can be downloaded from the official Get Paint website.

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Enter Fotografix, a lightweight portable image editor, that might be suited for the needs of webmasters and bloggers who want a simple image editor that supports all the features that they need. While Fotografix does not come with the functionality of Adobe Photoshop or GIMP it does offer access to all those features that most webmasters and bloggers require, and then some.

The image editor opens images as fast, if not a tad faster, than the popular Paint .net image editor. Webmasters have fast access to the image edition features that they require the most and it usually takes only a few seconds to edit an image so that it can be posted on a website. The only feature that seems to be missing is the ability to quickly draw a rectangle or circle around a part of the image to highlight that part.

Fotografix is an impressive (for that size) image editor that fits perfectly in every tools collection. It is compatible with computer systems running Windows XP and above.

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Paint.net is not compatible with Adobe Photoshop psd files by default which can be quite troublesome if you need to work with psd files occasionally. The psd plugin for paint.net adds support for Adobe Photoshop psd files to paint.net. It does not implement all features of the psd file though, only those that are needed to convert the image in the image editor and those that have a paint.net counterpart. Below is the list of support features:

• Layers
• Masks (only loading see To do list)
• RAW or RLE compressed files
• The following color modes are supported for loading an image: Gray scale, Indexed, 32 Bit-RGBA, CMYK (lossy conversation), Multichannel CMY (lossy conversation), Duotone (as gray scale), Lab (lossy conversation)
• For saving an image only 32-Bit RGBA is supported

The psd plugin comes as a single dll file that has to be placed into the filetypes folder of the Paint.net installation. The association of psd files with paint.net has to be created manually. This can be done by right-clicking a psd file on the computer system and selecting Open With > Choose Program from the context menu. Paint.net has to be selected as the program to open psd files and the checkbox “always use the selected program to open this kind of file” has to be ticked.

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So instead, I gave Paint.net another go, an application which I have tried before, but gave up because I heard GIMP was so awesome. Paint.net is a graphical application just like Photoshop, but without many of its fancy tools. If you just need some cropping, resizing and positioning action for images in your blog, Paint.net will be great. At around 6Mb in size, it doesn’t take a toll on your system either.

For me it works quite well for basic web design too, simple gradients, some web 2.0 style reflections, nothing too complex. The two things which I miss most about Photoshop though is the text capabilities and vector graphics. Text capabilities in both GIMP and Pain.net are shabby compared to PS, and Paint.net doesn’t really have great pen tools either. If you need way more power than the simple Windows Paint, but way less than Photoshop, Paint.net is a solid, well built, lightweight image editor for you.

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piZap is an online photo editor that offers something more. To be more specific, piZap lets you have fun with images. The flash-based application is ideal for people who love to manipulate their pictures and make them goofy. You can upload a file from your computer or play with one of the demo images on the site.

How do you make pictures funny? piZap allows you to add text via thought bubbles, put in stickers like emoticons or different parts of a face from the available options. You can also add effects to the picture or just paint over whatever you want. The options are endless. Here’s a photo I played around with.

Okay, it’s not great but don’t let my lack of creativity stop you. If you’re happy with how your picture looks, click ‘save’. The site then allows you to download the file, embed it on a website, and lets you post the image directly to most of the social networking sites around like Facebook, Twitter and the like.

One additional advantage to piZap is that you can have your picture printed on products like mouse pads, mugs, posters, tee shirts, calendars, etc. and then purchase them off the site. Of course, if you’d rather have someone else print the photo for you, you’re welcome to do that.

I quite like the site. It offers something different and is totally free. No registration required as well. Plus the site is really easy to use. I’d say the site is definitely worth a visit. How do you like piZap?  Do you find it interesting? Let me know in the comments.

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The program is very easy to use. The user needs to pick at least two images of the same object which are then processed automatically by the image editor. An error message will pop up if the software program was unable to compute the new panoramic image. If the process is successful the new image will be shown in the program’s interface.

Several post processing options are available to manipulate the newly created image further. The user can choose one of five camera motions, crop functionality like automatically cropping the image and image projection.

The image can be exported in various formats including jpeg, tiff, Adobe Photoshop psd and the HD Photo Image format. Microsoft Image Composite Editor is a nice tool that can combine multiple images of the same object into one larger image of the object. This is great for objects that are to large to fit in one picture taken with the digital camera but also for detailed images that should be combined.

Microsoft Image Composite Editor was tested on a Windows XP Service Pack 3 test system. It should run fine on other Microsoft operating systems and comes as a 32-bit and 64-bit version.

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Several image editing technologies have been developed that analyze and process a set of pictures from the same object removing any unwanted noise in the resulting picture. The Snapmania Online Image editor offers a tourist remover algorithm which can be used to process the images online to receive one clear image of the object or person on a set of photos.

The tourist remover is just one of the features of the image editor. The user can store images, use some basic image editing functions like red eye removal, auto correction and some special effects or create panoramas.

A set of pictures can be uploaded and selected while holding the CTRL key. These pictures can then be dragged on the Tourist Remover function at the bottom of the online application.

The only other step after this is to order the photos from left to right starting with the best approximation and to select a artifact removal quality level. The job is then send to the server which will process the images. This can take some time though. During tests the lowest queue rank was 550. This is probably the biggest weakness of the service. It might take a while before the pictures arrive in your photo storage. Thankfully though they are processed in the background and it is not a problem to logout and come back later to see if the photos have been processed.

Another problem is the storage space of only 100 Megabytes. The basic commercial plan offers 2 Gigabytes of storage space and so called Service Points which can be used for all kinds of actions like sending an MMS. There is also an unlimited plan which provides unlimited storage. Plans can be upgraded all the time.

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After loading an image into Image Analyzer the operations menu becomes available which is basically the central menu of the image processing software. It provides access to basic editing features like resizing, red eye removal or rotating the image.

Other features include:

• Automatic brightness, contrast, gamma and saturation adjustment
• Retouch tools
• Deconvolution for out-of-focus and motion blur compensation
• Morphological operations
• Color model conversion
• Distance, Fourier and discrete cosine transformation
• Retinex filter for reducing shadows and increasing local contrast

Image Analyzer is plugin driven and the software developer provides links to several plugins on their website that can be added by simply moving them into the ProcessingPlugins folder of the application. Image processing plugins like Combine for High Dynamic Range, 3D modeling, batch processing and Fractal interpolation are available and make up fine additions to image analyzer.

The image processing tool has build in camera, scanner and printer support and runs fine on most Microsoft operating systems. To be precise it runs fine on Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista. The size of Image Analyzer is 800 Kilobytes packed.

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Looking for an easy way to remove a background from one of your digital photos? Commercial photo editing programs like Photoshop have the tools necessary to erase complicated backgrounds from digital photos, but unless you are a professional, you probably don’t have this installed on your computer.

Luckily, there’s a way to remove backgrounds without needing Photoshop and actually without needing any software! There are many online photo editing services that you can use, one of which is FotoFlexer, a free online photo editor with many advanced features.

It is by the far the most advanced online editor in terms of the GUI interface, which is super fast, and in terms of the number of tools available, including morphing, recoloring, layering, effects, animations, and lots more.

To remove a background from an image, first upload a picture to FotoFlexer. You do not have to create an account if you already have photos on your computer. You can also grab pictures directly from Picasa, flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and Photobuck, but you’ll have to create a free account.

Now click on the Geek tab at the right and you’ll see a couple of buttons like Smart Cutout and Smart Scissors. The Smart Scissors tool is what we want to use here. It’s very similar to the magnetic lasso tool in Photoshop.

Now you will want to begin drawing a boundary around the part of the image you want to cut out from the background. Click at the starting point and then continue clicking in small increments along the outer edges of the object. You’ll notice that on each click, the Smart Scissors will automatically snap the curved lines around the the object like shown below:

Continue clicking around the object until you get to the end. Then you’ll need to join the last dot with your first dot in order to create a closed selection. Only then will you see that the option “Create Cutout” become available. When you hover over the first dot you had created, you’ll see it turns green, click on it and the background will darken.

Your final image would look like something below. You’ll have to play around with the scissors tools, but basically if you want a better cut, you’ll have to create more points at smaller distances.

You can use this free service to remove a person from a large group or to merge two photographs together, i.e. take one part of one picture and join it with a different part of a second picture. Enjoy!

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A click on an image loads an image viewer that resembles normal image viewers. Images can be dragged and dropped between folders and in a casket that can contain images from all folders. The casket is a virtual folder that can be used to create a custom slideshow for instance. Images can not only be imported from the local computer but also from Flickr. Images that are displayed can also be uploaded to Flickr.

The size of the thumbnails in the boards can be changed from tiny to a size that only displays one image at a time. Boards can be viewed separately as well. Twin Visions does not only offer image viewing functions but also image editing and sharing functions.

The image editor is not comparable to Photoshop or GIMP but it does offer a few quick fixes. It’s possible to remove noise, the red eye effect or fix the brightness with a mouse click. Effects can be added like blur or color effects. The current beta version will stop working on October 1st, 2008 and it is very likely that this could become a commercial software.

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Here you find additional links to upload images to Aviary, invite friends and launch the online applications that are enabled for your account. In my case only the image editor and a link to apply for an invite for the other applications. More about those later.

It’s only possible to upload one image with a maximum size of 5 Megabytes at a time and add the usual information (tags, title, description, rights) to it. It takes some time before the image is available depending on your upload speed and the load of the service. Max told me that he experienced a slow down of the system while uploading which I did not.

The usual community functions are available. Users can comment on and rate images, download the images and participate in the forums.

Phoenix the Image Editor

The image editor loads rather slowly but offers a wide variety of functions. Users can load images from their profile or from their computer. I’m not that into image editing but the functions that I would be looking for are all there. I can resize images, add text, work with layers and add several effects to it.

Someone who is using Adobe Photoshop or GIMP could definitely compare it on a professional level. It’s fine for the average user, that much I can say.

Images you work with are automatically saved and opened again when you open the image editor again.

Other applications

The list of applications, or tools how Aviary calls them, is impressive. A total of 18 tools is listed on their website including a music generator, vector editor, video editor and a desktop publishing layout generator.

Users can signup to receive initiations  for those tools once the invitations become available.

Aviary Invites

I have five Aviary invites and want to share them with you. I prefer at least one user with experience in Photoshop or another image editor who would like to write a short comparison which would be surely interesting to read. I would publish that comparison here at Ghacks.

If you want an invite reply here in the comments. Please add if you have experience with another image editor and would like to write that short comparison. Thanks again Max for the invite, it was really nice to think of me.

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The typical process after configuring the settings in SHUP looks like the following. The user presses a hotkey which either takes a screenshot of the desktop or the active window. That screenshot is then displayed in a basic image editor where it is possible to resize the image, change the filename, tags, image format or use a rectangle to edit and upload only a selection of the image.

The image will then be automatically uploaded to the default file hoster and the url of that image automatically pasted into the clipboard. That’s a fast and easy way of creating and uploading screenshots.

Six file hosters are currently supported including Flickr, ImageShack and Photobucket. Some require usernames and passwords that have to be added in the configuration, the upload will obviously fail otherwise.

My suggestion would be to turn off all those confirmations  to speed up the process a little bit. Shup adds itself to the right-click menu as well. Whenever you right-click an image you can access SHUP and use it to upload the file to an image hoster which is a very nice bonus.

I was not able to figure out how to upload images directly without having to open the image editor first. Think that is not possible.

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Vectormagic is a free online script provided by the University of Stanford which is capable of converting raster images to vector images. The interface was designed with usability and ease of use in mind. The user is guided thoroughly through the process, explanations help him understand each step in the process.

The conversion begins by uploading a raster image to the website. If the image is to large it will be automatically reduced to one Megapixel. A first analysis is suggesting an image classification automatically which is spot on most of the times. The user has to select a quality level of the image which is done by comparing the three settings he can choose from with a zoomed in part of the image he uploaded.

After that the amount of colors have to be selected. The choice is either 12 or less colors or more than 12 colors. Once that is done the image will be automatically vectorized and the result will be displayed in a frame next to the original image.

It is possible to adjust all the settings and render the image again if the output is not looking well. Results can also be edited manually to correct segmentation mistakes.

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Time Lapse is used to reduce the lenght of the time it took to paint the image to just a few minutes. So, what can you expect to see ? Image editing at its finest: Witness how one artists creates the Mona Lisa in paint for instance. Other paint beautiful cars, John Locke from Lost, a simple face and a lowrider. Still think that MS Paint is no real image editor ?

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The tool is available for many platforms including Windows, Mac and Unix / Linux. The best part is, that it has almost every feature that Adobe Photoshop has. Its able to load and save in 34 different formats making it also an ideal image converter.

The homepage has not only download links to the latest GIMP version but also an extensive tutorial section that helps you in your first steps with GIMP.

I recommend the tool to everyone who needs to use an image manipulation program for his personal images and websites.

Head over to the Gimp Homepage and take a look at it.

Technorati Tags: image, manipulation, gimp, converter, photoshop

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