Fractal Forge is an application written in Delphi that lets you easily explore the branches of the Mandelbrot set. If you use Fractal Forge generated images you must acknowledge it. Features include:

• Export images, with JPG, PNG or BMP format
• Create and edit your favorite colors sequences or import
• Fractint Palettes
• Avi creations to document your fractal tours
• Print Poster-size image tiling smaller ones
• Julia and Orbits floating windows
• Post-processing graphic filters
• Wallpaper exports
• Several generating and coloring formulas coded in assembler
• Supports up to 4 CPU
• Print Poster-size image tiling smaller ones
• Full screen mode
• Help and tutorial included

Download Fractal Forge 2.8.2 in Softonic

Fractals are fascinating things although I don't understand them one bit - I just like the pretty pictures they make.

Fortunately, no mathematical knowledge is required with ChaosPro which generates several fractals simultaneously in different windows but all at the same time. ChaosPro can create fractal animations, generate 3D fractal transformations in 2D, and create true color fractals. Of course, the processing power required to do this so unless you're working on something NASA might use, you'll be best to connect several PC's together and see what happens.

There are many fractal programs available for Windows but it's precisely the huge processing power that they require that usually ends up in crashes or system failure. They also tend to be very outdated and aimed at scientific or mathematical boffins which is where ChaosPro breaks the mould as a more modern and attractive attempt.

If you like pretty pictures or are seriously studying fractals then ChaosPro is one of the more user friendly and spectacular programs out there.

Download ChaosPro 3.3.215 in Softonic

Digitally sign your work/photos/graphic/artwork with iWatermark and claim and maintain the recognition you deserve. Build your company brand, by having your company logo on all your images.

Avoid the surprise of seeing your artwork elsewhere on the web or in an ad. Avoid the conflicts and headaches with plagiarists who claim they didn't know that you created it. Avoid the costly litigation that can be involved after that.

There are two main techniques for watermarking your images. One is the visible method, used by iWatermark, where you superimpose your logo or signature onto your image.

The second is designed to be invisible, and is used by companies such as Digimark. Hidden throughout the picture, within the code that generates it, is a recognizable pattern that identifies it as being your artwork.

Download iWatermark 3.1.3 in Softonic

Scan To PDF is the simplest and most efficient method of converting your paper based documents into PDFs. It boasts the following advantages:

• Thumbnail display for better visualisation
• Insert pages into or append to any existing PDF
• OCR and create searchable PDF option
• Appliction integration options
• Scan To EMail with PDF attachment option
• Administrative control over PDF file path
• Support for full PDF document description
• Page re-ordering using drag & drop
• Support for Adobe® viewer pre-definition settings
• Indexing for Adobe® Catalog
• Batch scanning option
• Auto-Generate filename - increment, barcode, datestamp

Download ScanToPDF 3.2.0 in Softonic

If you don't have time to type a document, why not scan it and turn it into text instantly? Softi FreeOCR is a program that serves to interpret scanned documents and to turn them to editable text on your PC. If you have a lot of documents that you need to transfer to editable text, then this could save you hours of time.

Note that this program only detects English text. Softi FreeOCR, or rather Tesseract - the OCR motor that the program uses - only recognises English. However, you can add other languages by uploading them from the developer website and extracting the files to “the tessdata” folder which can be found within the program folder.

This is a decent attempt at a text reading program but unfortunately, it doesn't always read documents correctly and has trouble with small text. Nevertheless, it can capture the majority of a document which will save you time.

Download Softi FreeOCR 2.4 in Softonic

OCR software need not be expensive and can be the quickest way to transfer huge amounts of text in an article or publication to editable text.

TopOCR is completely free and designed to be simple and user-friendly enough for use with a digital camera or smartphone. The aim is to make it easy to acquire documents and texts from business cards, newspapers, books and magazines without having to carry around a bulky notebook computer and scanner. OCR is surprisingly accurate and the developers claim it has up to a 99.8% accuracy rate with a 3 Megapixel camera. There are no page limits and no extra downloads or components needed. It can handle images with mixed text and graphics and it can even tolerate skew and uneven lighting. In terms of output formats, you have searchable PDF and HTML formats that are able to read 11 different languages. In addition, Smartphone owners will find it indispensable with full support for them including a useful (although not very accurate) Text-To-Speech software. This means that you can record thoughts, minutes and dictations and play them back later for TopOCR to print out.

This is a hugely comprehensive and generally accurate OCR package and best of all, it's entirely free.

Download TopOCR 3.0 in Softonic

For anyone involved in software reviewing like the team at Softonic, annotations of screenshots and other data are essential in day-to-day work.

The same goes for anyone who regularly has to use presentations and other graphical displays to share information. ZoomIt aims to make presentations and annotations easy enough for anyone to illustrate and add comments and annotations to their presentations and screenshots. The first time you run ZoomIt, you're presented with a configuration dialog that gives you some tips on what the program can do and how it should be used. During this time, you're also offered the chance to specify alternate hotkeys for zooming in and out and for entering drawing mode without zooming. In addition, you can customise the drawing pen color and size although this is one aspect where ZoomIt could do with some work as both the sizes and colour palette is rather limited. There's also what the program calls a "break timer" that remains active even when you tab away from the timer window but then allows you to return to the timer window by clicking on the ZoomIt tray icon.

This is by no means the most advanced screen annotation utility you'll ever use but for simple arrow pointing and circling of certain facts and figures, it does a quick and efficient job.

Download ZoomIt 2.0 in Softonic

WizFlow helps you create professional flowcharts and similar diagrams. It is uniquely tailored for very easy use with little or no training required. Wizflow allows you to work with a single object or a group of objects, drawing boxes or symbols of many shapes and connecting them with lines of various types.

You can enter explanatory text at any location, using a grid that helps you to keep your work symmetrical and aligned. WizFlow handles the hard parts of drawing a flowchart and leaves you free to focus on the layout and appearance.

Wizflow contains extensive features such as:

• Full zoom
• OLE connectivity for inserting charts in other documents
• Poster printing
• Graphics import and export
• Automatic routing
• Curves
• Flow symbols

Download WizFlow Flowcharter 6.01.2013 in Softonic

Smaller Animals ThumbNailer is a Windows utility that allows you to create thumbnail images and image galleries. You can use it to convert between one graphics format and another, change image color depth, resize images, make image galleries for the web or CD and more.

Features of the app:

• Wizards to help you get up and running quickly
• JPG, GIF, MPEG, JPEG-2000, PNG, TIFF, PCX, BMP, WBMP, PhotoCD, Photoshop, TGA, ASCII, WMF and EMF
• AVI, TTF (TrueType Fonts), animated GIF and multi-page TIFF frame extraction
• Support for reading RAW, NEF, FlashPix, video files and more via plug-ins
• Batch or single file operation
• HTML page generator, with links, tables, HTML templates, and more
• Output images in a wide choice of formats and color depths
• Apply contrast, sharpening, brightness corrections
• Copy EXIF and IPTC data from JPG files

Download ThumbNailer 9.0.4.3 in Softonic

I like almost all sorts of art and that includes, being a software reviewer, ASCII art.

ASCII art is the name given to those images created with written characters, that is, the letters, numbers and signs that form the ASCII code and that you probably use on a daily basis. Some people can create ASCII art images from scratch, which is certainly an impressive ability, but I find it much easier to use a tool like AscGen. This excellent program generates an ASCII version of any image you load within seconds and also enables you to change, edit or optimize it in real time.

The result is always displayed on its interface, so you can test new characters, resize the area you want to use for your ASCII piece of art or resize it while having a view of the final image. The only drawback I found during the conversion process was that the original image thumbnail on the right side pane is too small: this makes area selection a bit uncomfortable.

Once you're happy with your ASCII creation, Ascgen allows you to save it either as text or image, in color or black and white. In any case the result is really attractive and can also be printed from the program itself.

With Ascgen you can easily turn your photos into original works of ASCII art.

Download Ascgen 0.9.5 in Softonic

Use SimpleOCR to add accurate character recognition capabilities to your custom software without the complexity and expense of runtime licensing. The SimpleOCR freeware demonstrates the power of its engine and is completely free.

Convert your scanned images to text files or Word documents with SimpleOCR is also a royalty-free developer toolkit (aka SDK or API) that you may use to add OCR to your custom software application. A 15-day demo of Charactell's Softwriting handprint recognition engine is also included. Machine print recognition has no limitations or advertisements.

Download SimpleOCR 3.5 in Softonic

DesktopZoom is a complete zoom tool that enables you to see even the smallest pixels of any window, application, document or picture opened in your computer, thanks to an incredible zooming capacity.

The program doesn't require installation. It features a wide range of options, with which to zoom in the entire desktop, an active window or just the area below the cursor.

The downside to it is that there are so many possibilities that the interface seems a bit confusing. Also, I find that sometimes the zoom effect is difficult to control, especially when zooming the whole desktop.

DesktopZoom magnifies your screen and lets you see things in detail.

Download DesktopZoom 2.1 in Softonic

ASCII art is a fascinating way to create artistic compositions based on real pictures using only ASCII characters. This tool automatizes the whole process, converting a photo into an ASCII creation with just a mouse click.

The quality of results vary a lot depending on the source picture. Also, the program has a strict size limitation for the resulting image. You can choose between using random characters or just one selected by you, but we missed the possibility to use a whole sentence or at least one word. The text font is fixed too.

On the positive side, ASCII Art Maker is really fast doing its job and once it's done, you can save it in different formats.

Download ASCII Art Maker 1.4 in Softonic

One of the few drawbacks of owning a digital camera is that it can often be tricky to import photo files in RAW format from your snapper to your computer. Stepok's Raw Importer aims to solve all that by providing you with a simple tool for grabbing images off your camera with the minimum amount of fuss.

The free program actually helps you improve the quality of your images as part of the process, offering you features for selecting the interpolation method and making adjustments to the resolution, colour intensity and saturation. Although Raw Importer only supports conversion to JPEG or TIFF, this should be fine for most people, and it does make brisk worked of converting these files. With the inclusion of a Batch Import mode, there's really no need to look elsewhere when dragging RAW format images from your digicam.

Download Stepok Raw Importer 1.0 in Softonic

If you need a great looking flowchart, org chart, floor plan, calendar, form, presentation or any other type of chart or diagram, but you don't have time to learn a new, complex program, the SmartDraw is perfect for you.

You can easily drag-and-drop the shapes you need from all the symbols and templates available. You can also add and edit your own photos. With SmartDraw you will quickly have your flowchart setup.

Download SmartDraw 2007 8.16 in Softonic

Picasa2Flickr provides a plugin for Picasa that allows users to upload their photos to Flickr.
Using a custom "BlogThis" Button, Picasa posts XML data (photos URL and titles) to a custom URL.

On this URL, a CGI script parses the XML and provides photos URL and titles to a dedicated Java applet. The Applet retrieves the photos and uploads them to a Flickr account.

It's as simple as that!

Download Picasa2Flickr 0.0.1 in Softonic

Textaizer is one of the most versatile freeware text mosaic creation freeware available on the internet. This application that turns your pictures in little pieces of art by re-painting the bitmap from text. Similar techniques exists such as ASCII art, by painting a bitmap from ascii characters with no particular sequence. Textaizer can be regarded as an intelligent ASCII text mosaic creator, where the input can be a random selection of ascii characters, but also predefined text.

This approach is similar to photo mosaic creation, where the photo is rebuild from small pictures that match the average color of the source bitmap wher it is placed. From a distance the picture is recognised, from close the individual pictures can be seen. Textaizer creates the same effect: from close you can easily read the text.

A second feature of Textaizer is to create genuine ASCII art pictures: text made from monospaced characters, famous for its application as e.g. e-mail stationairies. Textaizer is similar to Mosaizer but with text.

Download Textaizer 1.0 in Softonic

Profile Picture Genius is a free application to cutting and resizing pictures which you can then take as a custom profile avatar. These avatars can be published to any website or use in your favorite instant messenger, such as MySpace, MSN, Skype, Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, phpBB forums, vBulletin forums and many others.

Though you can already crop and resize images with any simple graphic editor, Profile Picture Genius makes it even easier as it already includes presets for the most common avatar sizes allowed in all those sites and apps, so that you don't need to be constantly counting pixels.

Download Profile Picture Genius 1.0 in Softonic

According to the developers, Scribus is the only open source page layout application which runs natively on all 3 major desktop operating systems; Linux, MacOSX and Windows. Scribus also runs on Unix™ variants like Solaris. HP-UX and the BSDs.

Both online and direct commercial support is available for Scribus. There is a very friendly and active user community which has developed around Scribus with the active participation of the developers.

Download Scribus 1.3.3.8 in Softonic

Secret Photoagent allows to securely and quickly send your digital photographs. It encrypts photos and protects them with password, so nobody can see them unless they have the password.

It can compress the size of photographs, so the message size does not get too large and send encrypted photos by email.

The picture viewer is also useful - it has a "hide" function so that nobody will notice anything unusual if you're looking at photos when you shouldn't be.

Download Secret PhotoAgent 1.5 in Softonic