The free online photo effect editor Psykopaint basically offers a very similar functionality. The biggest difference is that Psykopaint is an online tool that everyone with a modern web browser and Internet connection can use.

The majority of tools can be used right away, only the layer functionality becomes only available after registration. An account is however needed to save images, share them online or create a virtual greetings card.

You can upload a photo from your computer system. This process is available without registration. Even better, photos of all sizes are accepted by the service (I tested it with a 4000×3000 pixel photo which worked just fine).

A set of brushes are available in the lower left corner of the screen. These brushes define the art style that you want to apply. The selection is large, from old masters like Van Gogh and Degas over standard effects like Mosaic, Pencil or Pixels to outright crazy brushes that add hears, butterflies or a shredder like Ribbon effect to the photo.

Each brush is visualized on mouse over, which is excellent to get a better understanding of its functionality without having to test it first.

I have not found a way to apply a filter or brush to the full image. You can change the size and opacity of each brush with sliders in the main interface. It is furthermore possible to zoom in and out with the mouse wheel or the slider in the lower right corner of the screen. a click on z can be used to go back a maximum of ten steps.

A click on Details underneath the brushes menu opens options to change a brush’s shape. A total of ten different customization options are available, most in slider form.

There is also a colors menu to change the color, brightness and contrast of the image.

Psykopaint can be fun to play with, even if you lack in talent when it comes to painting or using an image editor (like I do). It could be interesting to give kids something to play with as well.

Users with enough talent can create great pieces of art with the program. I suggest you check out the gallery for some examples of that. Or just visit the front page and start working on your images right away.

Tintii Photo Filter is an Open Source program for the Microsoft Windows operating system that can highlight specific areas of a photo. It does so by converting all other areas of the photo to black and white so that only the highlighted parts appear in color.

When you first load a photo into the application it appears completely in black and white (including gray tones). The program makes automatic suggestions about areas of the image that could be highlighted with colors. A click on one of the preview thumbs there will colorize the selection and keep the remaining image in gray, white and black tones.

Sliders next to each thumbnail preview are available to make changes to the images hue, saturation and lightness. The post-processing pane below the actual image offers additional sliders to change decay, edge and hardness values.

It is possible to select multiple thumbnails or just one. Once you are satisfied with the result you can save it to the hard drive.

While it is possible to add and remove thumbs from the program, it is not possible to select a specific area of the image that you want to highlight. This is probably the greatest weakness of the program at this point in time as it can happen that no thumbs with the right selection are available.

Tintii is regardless of that an interesting program for users who like to modify some of their photos or images. It is without doubt possible to use photo editors like Adobe Photoshop, Gimp or Paint.net for a similar effect, but those usually require more knowledge of the program.

The selective coloring software comes with plugins for several popular applications including Photoshop. Windows users can download the software from the Sourceforge website. The application is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Microsoft Windows.

PixBuilder Studio which has recently been released in version 2 is a freeware alternative for Windows. The program on first glance seems to offer a similar functionality as Paint.Net.

You can associate image file extensions with the program during installation, which would speed things up if you do a lot of photo editing on your computer.

You find the usual assortment of tools lined up in the main interface of the program. One interesting option is the ability to move the tools panel around. You can for instance place it under the File toolbar instead of the left sidebar. There is unfortunately no option to make it a floating toolbar as Paint.Net does.

Toolbars in image editors seem to use more or less the same standard when it comes to which tools are provided there. Pixbuilder Studio is not different in this regard. You find the most popular tools there. The right side displays all other panels. This includes the zoom panel, an undo panel, custom tools panel to customize the selected tool or a list of channels.

Many options are only available under the main File toolbar at the top of the program window. This includes a huge list of color tools and effects. The program supports all my requirements (including blur) and then a lot more for users who want to dive deeper into image editing.

The program supports only a handful of formats, which can be a issue, especially for photographers who want to edit Raw images. Support are jpeg, gif, png, psd and a handful of lesser used formats.

I suggest you take a look at the developer website which lists the core program features and offers download links. PixBuilder Studio is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the Windows operating system.

The program can be a viable alternative for users who do not want to install Paint.Net because of its dependence on the Microsoft .Net Framework.

BatchBlitz is a free photo resizer for the Windows operating system that can be used for that purpose. The software program divided the resizing into three steps beginning with the selection of the photos on the local computer system.

It offers advanced file filtering options to find and process only the photos and images that the user of the software wants. Provided are for instance name, location and regular expression filters.

The output settings are defined in the second step with options to save all processed photos in a new folder or to overwrite the original images.

The actions menu is the final step of the process. The photo resizing end manipulation actions are defined in here. The actions are divided into pre-processors, processors and post-processors with file filters in the first category, photo editing options in the second and output options to convert and rename the photos in the third.

The main processors include resizing, rotating or colorizing photos as well as adding pictures or text and changing auto contrast and auto levels. The way the options are selected is probably not the most sophisticated one as each option has to be clicked on to open its configuration menu. It would probably be easier to display the options right in the same interface.

A click on the Start button initiates the photo resizing process. BatchBlitz is a nice program that can easily be used to manipulate a large amount of photos. The software can be downloaded from the developer’s website. (via Donation Coder)

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.

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.

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.