Introduction

PhotoFiltre is a relatively small application and unlike Photoshop, will install and launch very quickly. The interface, loaded with all the features and options, can be confusing at first glance but you'll soon get used to it. The right side is composed of the shape and drawing tools and an optimizable color palette. The top bar has all the essential image editing and modification options. PhotoFiltre sadly doesn't let you customize the interface and choose your favorite tools.

Features

Among all the image modification tools, of particular usefulness is the quick contrast/hue and saturation buttons because you can check out the effects and immediately and easily correct the image if you're not satisfied with its quality. If you trust PhotoFiltre, you can also let it adjust these parameters automatically.

Like any self-respecting image editing application, PhotoFiltre includes the most widely used filters to transform your image, but if you need to make really significant changes, you'll find yourself limited. Furthermore, unlike Photoshop, PhotoFiltre doesn't include layers, making it more challenging to work on different elements of the image separately.

Like the excellent free image viewer Irfanview, PhotoFiltre covers the majority of image formats and can batch process and convert images rapidly. PhotoFiltre has five different zoom options yet they seem to be more or less similar. The magnifier is probably less precise than the drop down percentage pane, and the auto zoom adjusts the image’s size according to PhotoFiltre's window size.

The image explorer is located at the bottom of the screen, and if you set it according to your image file you'll be able to quickly preview all your pictures. However, if you work with multiple image files, it can quickly become confusing, as you’ll have to open up an explorer tree pane every time to look for your pictures.

PhotoFiltre contains all the essential tools and options to edit and optimize pictures.

Download PhotoFiltre 7.1.1 in Softonic

Nowadays, it is increasingly losing ground to Adobe's InDesign but its continued use in the professional publishing industry is testament to the power and quality of QuarkXPress.

The reason for its longevity is simply because QuarkXPress is a very powerful design and page layout software package but at the same time, retains an intuitive and versatile interface that lets you combine elegant typography with color and pictures. The end result is highly professional web and print layouts.

However, those looking for major improvements in version 9 of QuarkXPress might be disappointed. The update adds a little more power to your elbow in the form of an App Studio for mobiles and iPads allowing you to create your own interactive publications. Beyond this, many of the modifications and updates are relatively subtle, such as the possibility to export to ePUB for the eBook Market, iPad, Sony Reader and NOOK format converters plus an image grid.

Getting content into QuarkXPress had previously been one of it's major bugbears but the developers had already made it far more flexible in version 8, accepting content from products from rivals such as Adobe Bridge, iPhoto or Extensis Portfolio allowing you to drag content from QuarkXPress to Photoshop, Illustrator, Microsoft Word or the desktop. Version 9 enhances this flexibility to take into account the rapidly expanding eBook and iPad market.

It's hard top sum up all of QuarkXPress's features in a few words but if you've never tried it and you're into Desktop Publishing, it's safe to say you won't be disappointed although you should also check out Adobe InDesign too before making any decisions.

Download QuarkXPress 9.3 in Softonic

If you want to display your drawings online, you have two options: either scan hard copies of your drawings or draw them directly on your computer. TwistedBrush Pro Studio lets you do the latter in impressive fashion once you learn how to use it.

If you're envisioning designing sharp looking graphics for a new website, turn back now. TwistedBrush Pro Studio and its free version TwistedBrush Open Studio has not been developed to create clean crisp graphics. It will frustrate you unless you use it for what it was designed for, which is drawing and art. As a result, one of the best and most effective ways to use TwistedBrush Pro Studio is with a pen and a drawing tablet.

When TwistedBrush Pro Studio starts, a quick-start guide designed to gently introduce you to the features will pop up. While this has the potential to be useful, some users might be frustrated that the guide is largely made up of screenshots with information bubbles. If you have difficulty understanding a concept, there're no links to click on to obtain further information.

Thankfully, TwistedBrush Pro Studio is relatively easy to navigate through. A lot of effort was put into making it a realistic substitute for actual painting, and when you start working with the various brushes you'll immediately see that they interact well with the colors to create a convincing portrait. Undoubtedly TwistedBrush Pro Studio's greatest strength is the vast selection of brush types and styles that are available to use. From simple fine pens, to wet oil brushes and progressive 3D designs, users have a lot to choose from in TwistedBrush Pro Studio. The beauty of each brush is that it can be used quickly and easily, with stunning results.

Users will also find support for all the major image file formats in TwistedBrush Pro Studio, including TIFF, PSD, JPG, GIF, and PNG. Unfortunately, it seems TwistedBrush Pro Studio doesn't have a select tool. After using Adobe Photoshop for so long, many users will view this as key tool in any imaging software. Alternatively it could be the very omission of the select tool that sets TwistedBrush Pro Studio apart, with the production process being more of an evolution than a construction.

TwistedBrush Pro Studio is a quality painting and drawing tool that works best for users who have a drawing tablet handy.

Download TwistedBrush Pro Studio 18.14 in Softonic

You can enhance your videosusing more than 30 built-in effects (twirl, rotate,skew, mirror, mosaic, flower etc. ), change brightness,contrast, sharpness and even movie speed.

You can importbitmaps, JPEG, PNG, PCX and TARGA images sequence to a single movie,print stills out, and export to animated GIFs/FLI/FLC. AVIedit can edit existing.

avi files, compose clipson a timeline box, create titles and effects. You can add or remove audio tracks, compress your videoswith modern codecs like MPEG4, DivX, Indeo and even more.

AVIedit can convert mp3 files to wav and add them to your ownclips, also you can lossless crop MJPG videos compatible with Pinnacle capture boards.

Special hardware (video capture board) is required ONLY forcapture. Aviedit supports TWAIN deviceslike a scanner or digicam. Also it can use most of Adobe(tm)Photoshop compatible plug-ins.

Aviedit supports 14 user interface languages: English, German, Russian, Italian, Chinese and others. AVIedit doesn`t need any MFC, Visual C++ or VBasic runtime libraries.

Download AVIedit by Alexander Milukov 3.38 in Softonic

These filters are for use with Adobe Photoshop or other compatible host applications. Colour Studio: Plug-In Collection will help you quickly access a selection of image enhancement controls with one easy-to-use dialog.

You will be provided with a whole range of features from subtle color correction to more dynamic effects. You can convert your pictures to black and white or toned monochrome, add grain, desaturate individual channels to limit or improve certain color ranges, invert the red, green or blue values and flood with intense color casts.

Colour Studio: Plug-In Collection has a feature called retrograde that will help recreate classic effects as if you were shooting with traditional black and white film.

The fluoron filter is based on a kind of ultra-violet or fluorescent style color shift, but also offers many other variations for interesting results.

Alienator takes an alternative approach to color modification effects by generating random combinations of many hidden variables. Vivida provides a quick and easy way to enhance the brightness, contrast and saturation values in each individual channel of your image.

Download Colour Studio : Plug-In Collection 2.0 in Softonic

A few of the main features of AVD Batch Converter are viewing images in a separate window, resampling images (up to 9 resample filters), changing the image's resolution, cropping selected areas, rotating through any angle, creating mirror images and many other options.

Additional features include image effects like Auto Equalize, Negative, Shadow Border and Soft Shadow and contrast regulation. Users will also be able to add Gaussian blur drop shadows to the images, or even a border in any color or size.

AVD Batch Converter could be useful to users who need to convert large numbers of image files and be able to apply effects and different settings to them.

Download AVD Batch Converter 1.6 in Softonic

IconUtils is a collection of individual tools by Aha-Soft that let you perform a series of modifications to icons and that comes to you as one convenient file, making it easy to install and use. This package includes IconLover 4.10, AhaView 3.13, Any to Icon 3.30 and Icon to Any 3.0.

Features:

• Create and edit icons in either standard or custom sizes, in color depths up to 32-bit True Color
• Create and edit smooth semi-transparent icons for Windows XP
• Create and edit static and animated cursors
• Paint images with gradient and chess fill
• Modify images with drop shadow, smooth, grayscale, rotate, roll and mirror effects
• Make icons and cursors from various graphic formats, including ICO, BMP, JPEG, ANI, CUR, GIF, PNG, TIFF, PCX, WMF, WBMP, XPM, XBM and Adobe Photoshop PSD
• Convert Mac icons to Windows format
• Save icon images as ICO, BMP, JPEG, CUR, PNG, WBMP, XBM, XPM, PSD (Adobe Photoshop) and RC (Resource Compiler) files
• Convert multiple files at once
• Create and manage icon and cursor libraries for better and more efficient storage
• Extract icons and cursors from Windows executables, libraries and animated cursor files
• Modify icons inside executables
• Search in folders for icons and cursors
• Customize desktop and folder icons
• View images fullscreen
• Browse folders in thumbnail mode
• Convert images to BMP, JPEG and PNG formats

Download IconUtils 5.0 in Softonic

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2 is the upgraded version of what was formerly known as Microsoft Photo Info which allowed photographers to add, change and delete common "metadata" properties for digital photographs.

This latest version does all this still but also provides a whole set of tools for photographers to perform various other tasks with their images including capturing images from their cameras. In addition, you can now geotag your photos, view and edit metadata, and utilize the Microsoft Live Local to store and publish photos.

In addition, Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2 works much better with Adobe products (useful when editing metadata that you'll later edit in Photoshop) and users can now convert from RAW to JPEG, TIFF, and HD using "As Shot" settings. It now also supports 64-bit Windows systems. Probably the most useful update is the geo-tagging GUI which allows you to quickly identify exactly where your images were taken and it even utilizes GPS coordinates.

Microsoft Pro Tools 2 is a remarkably well designed and thought out photo processing app for a Microsoft product and even professional photographers will find something useful in it.

Download Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2 in Softonic

This is a powerful, easy to use utility for finding, extracting, creating and editing icons, cursors and managing icon libraries and image lists. Windows Cursor and Icon Editor With IconLover you can:

• Manage icons, static and animated cursors, icon and cursor libraries, image lists
• Create and edit smooth semi-transparent icons, static and animated cursors for Windows XP
• Create and edit icons in standard and custom sizes, with color depth up to 32-bit True Color
• Make stylish icons from your images
• Paint images with gradient and chess fill
• Create multi-layer images
• Modify images with drop shadow, opacity, smooth, negative, grayscale, colorize, rotate, roll and mirror effects
• Import and export ICO, BMP, JPEG, ANI, CUR, GIF, PNG, TGA, TIFF, WMF, WBMP, XPM, XBM and Adobe Photoshop PSD image formats
• Import Mac OS icons from ICNS and RSRC files
• Manage icon libraries for better and more efficient image storage
• Extract icons from Windows executables, libraries and animated cursor files, ZIP and RAR archives
• Download icons from the Internet
• Modify icons inside executables
• Search in folders for icons and cursors
• Convert or apply effects to multiple icons at once
• Customize desktop and folder icons

Download IconLover 5.31 in Softonic

GIF images are most commonly used in banners, buttons and sometimes movies because of their high resolution and sharp on screen quality.

However, they can be notoriously difficult to work with due to their file size and other factors which make them harder to manipulate than something like GIF's. This is especially true when it comes to animation. That's where Advanced GIF animator steps in - a remarkably powerful application which allows you to work easily with GIF images. The program allows you to create high resolution GIF 89a images, manage GIF image frames, create finite and infinite animation loops, set and change frame interchange frequency and convert GIF images from or to Windows bitmap files (*.bmp). This is a tool simple enough for beginners but also with enough power to attract more experienced users and designers. It can be used as a stand alone application or to supplement dedicated design programs such as Windows Paint, PaintShop Pro or Adobe Photoshop. The ultimate aim of the program is to allow anyone to create studio quality animations with very little experience although despite being deceptively simple, it will take you longer to get to grips with than you think.

Breathe new life into your GIF's and animate them in a few clicks with Advanced GIF animator.

Download Advanced GIF Animator 3.0 in Softonic

Digitope Pixelshop is excellent for icon and cursor development. With this full-featured icon and cursor editor, you can create and edit existing icons (ICO), cursors (CUR) and animated cursors (ANI), in all sizes and formats, including the new Windows XP Alpha format.

You can create an icon by using Pixelshop’s easy to use, built-in utility for converting an image (most formats including Adobe Photoshop Images) to an icon, or by using Pixelshop’s simple icon designer interface.

You can also apply several effects to your icons, such as a 3D drop shadow, smoothing or colorizing. Incorporated in Pixelshop is an extensive help file, including tutorials. Create personalized folder icons. Customize your desktop. Add a favicon to your website. Make a cursor. Import Adobe Photoshop files. Modify your icons. With Pixelshop you can.

Download Pixelshop 5.12.7 in Softonic

Zoom Studio 2 - Home Edition is an easy-to-use graphics software optimized for high resolution digital photos, allowing you to manage photos and image catalogues simply and easily.

Create a zoom web gallery from photos and export as a web site. Animate still images and export as html for the web. You can even convert existing HTML web pages into zoom photo pages.

Handle large digital photos

Load a photo by double clicking its thumbnail image in the studio. When the cursor is above the image you can pan the image by holding the left mouse button and moving the mouse.

To zoom in on something of interest press the right mouse button and move the mouse forward and to zoom out move the mouse backwards.

Manage your photos

Use cut/copy/paste or drag-n-drop to move files on your computer or computers on the network. The innovative folder image feature makes it possible to assign thumbnail images to directories making it simple and easy to remember just where you have your photos.

Zoom Studio integrates easily with your favourite image/HTML editor.

Create a photo gallery

Simply select the photos you want to create a gallery from, right click and select make gallery. An HTML photo gallery will be created from your photos and displayed in the studio.

Select among the different types of galleries from the template list. Write a title for your gallery and click export. You now have a web ready photo album.

Photo Notes

When your photo file is moved the information will always stay there just like if you wrote on the back of a printed photograph. The file information (iptc) can be read by popular image programs like Adobe Photoshop.

The IPTC gallery outputs all this information as HTML making it readable from a common web browser.

Animations

Create a new animation by right clicking an image and select animate. Pan and Zoom to the views in the photo and click add to create the animation.

Customize the animation and export it. The finished animation is still a single photo but uses Inzomia to create the animation at runtime on the visitors computer

Inzomify

Select Inzomify on a HTML page. All images on the page will be listed as thumbnails. Select the images you want to be able to pan and zoom. Click preview to see how the the page will look and when you are satisfied click export to save the new page.

Download Zoom Studio 2.20 Home Edition in Softonic