Animated Wallpaper Maker is all-in-one solution for customizing your desktop background with amazing animations effects. It contains an editor that allows you to add animation to standard windows wallpaper (supporting all common image formats) and a built-in player replaces the static windows background with an animated one. The wallpaper animation requires minimum system resources and can be disabled/enabled at will.

No special skills or programming knowledge is required to us our software. You don’t need to be a studio artist or graphic designer.

Download Animated Wallpaper Maker 3.2.2 in Softonic

Viewing

While the viewing functionality is a no-brainer, FastStone Image Viewer comes with a range of methods with which to browse pics. First off, there is the standard file browser that displays thumbnails of your images with a preview window for the file that is currently selected. FastStone Image Viewer also offers an option to check out individual pictures in full-screen. When you're in fullscreen, remember, you'll also have access to the full range of FastStone Image Viewer tools.

Editing

However, FastStone Image Viewer goes beyond simply displaying images. You can perform quick edits to really bring out the best in your pics, such as adding a stylish frame that acts as a mask to reduce the sharp edges or, if you happen to be working with 3D, FastStone Image Viewer also offers a very effective bump map option that will serve you well for texturing. There are of course the standard tools of brightness/darkness adjustment, sharpness/blur, grayscale, red-eye removal and more.

Batch tools

Further great features come in the form of batch rename and convert options. These could prove invaluable to many web developers looking for a quick way to prepare their PSD files for the web. With the inclusion of these batch functions, it would have been good has FastStone Image Viewer pushed the boat out even further with an option to apply batch effects, for example to brighten up a group of photos that were taken in a dark space but alas, it's not there!

Looking for faults with FastStone Image Viewer is like looking for the corner of a circle, although if you insist on nitpicking, you can say that in the thumbnail browser view dragging and dropping should be possible for moving files. However when you realize that it is possible to drag and drop with the left nav bar that argument looses its legs.

There's healthy competition in the image viewer arena, but thanks to the innovative features of FastStone Image Viewer the bar has been raised to new heights.

Download FastStone Image Viewer 4.8 in Softonic

What is Lightroom?

If you're not familiar with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, it's a photo processing app that's designed to be used by professional photographers for the post-production of batches of photos, and it's often used in conjunction with Adobe's seminal app, Photoshop.

The new interface

This latest version of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom looks great. It's divided into seven sections - Library, Develop, Map, Book, Slideshow, Print and Web- which let you easily flit between different stages of management, processing and presentation. There's also some awesomely configurable options, running from how the app looks to how it acts, before and after processing. There's only one thing - the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom interface is vast, and to get the most from it, you'll need a large screen.

Photo management

The upside to using a dedicated photo processing app is the ease with which Adobe Photoshop Lightroom allows you to see, categorize and manage your photos. Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is no exception, with a great import features and options, and, new to this version, location-based organization. You'll find the tools to manage this function under Map.

Photo processing

In version 4 of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Adobe's self-stated aim has been to "extract more detail from highlights and shadows, make a wider range of targeted adjustments, and easily share your images and video clips on social media and photo sharing sites". It certainly provides some interesting options to do this, including highlight and shadow recovery, white balance features and local noise/moire tools. This is in addition to all the usual editing tools, which are present and easy to apply.

Presentation options

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom really excels when it comes to presenting your photos and passing them on. You can email directly from this new version, as well as sharing with a variety of social networks and photo sharing sites. The Book feature is also new, allowing you to create a variety of beautiful photo books from templates. This complements Adobe Photoshop Lightroom's Slideshow option, giving you even more scope for creating en eye-catching and imaginative end product.

Video management

In this version, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom really ramps up video support, further increasing its versatility. This means that you can make even more complex edits to video clips, as well as easier video publishing.

Conclusion

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 is an exceedingly promising piece of software. It can look complicated - and even overcrowded - on first glance, but once you become more familiar with app, you'll see everything adds up to offering you one of the most comprehensive photo processing apps around.

Download Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.4 in Softonic

Note that GIMP Extensions will overwrite any other extension selected that you may have already installed. Most of the extensions in GIMP Extensions are mainly from GIMP Plugin Registry. GIMP Extensions provides a useful collection of extensions for GIMP such as Plug-ins, Scripts, Brushes etc that add more power to one of the most powerful free design tools on Mac.

GIMP Extensions is a must have for anyone that uses GIMP regularly.

Download GIMP Extensions 2.9 in Softonic

GIMP has been around for over two decades and development has been stable over the years. The newest update for GIMP gives a slew of new features and a glimpse into the future for this incredible open source image editor.

Features

All the features of GIMP are still present. You can create your own images with tools for airbrushing, penciling, cloning, and creating gradients. Power users can create their own brushes and patterns to use later. GIMP also allows users to manipulate images imported into the program. You can crop, add text, resize, and create nested layers. There is even a way to animate your creations.

New additions

GIMP has now been updated with many user interface tweaks to make the application accessible to newbies. The biggest interface addition is the ability to edit in a single-window. GIMP versions of the past drew criticism for their confusing interfaces, but the developers are addressing many of these issues in this newest version. While single-window mode is great, it is also disappointing that there is no way to view multiple projects side by side.

Other updated features include easier text editing, nested layer groups, and a shift to using the Generic Graphics Library (GEGL), which is a more sophisticated image processing framework. GEGL was introduced a couple of years back in a developer version and has now made its way into the sable, consumer version. GIMP developers hope to move entirely to GEGL by version 2.10. One of the major advantages of GIMP using GEGL is the ability for non-destructive editing and high bit-depth images.

GIMP now only saves to its own XCF format to retain layers and other file manipulation information. Users can still choose to save in formats like JPEG and PNG but will have to "export" the project instead of saving. This follows in the footsteps of Adobe Photoshop.

The latest GIMP is better than ever. Its developers are taking the user experience into serious consideration and are speeding up development for this already great photo editor.

Download GIMP 2.8.4 in Softonic

Amazingly, since Bosnian developer Irfan Skiljan released the image viewer back in 1996, he’s generously kept it free of charge in spite of its massive popularity. Perhaps even more incredibly, the app still stands at just over 1Mb, bucking the trend of programs that swell immensely as the feature updates go by. In fact, it’s Irfanview’s slimline qualities that are its greatest asset, helping to make it the fastest image viewer in the West. Images load almost instantaneously when you click on them and you get rapid-fire results when cycling through a directory of photos using the Back and Forward buttons. It’s only when you’re flicking through vast amounts of images using the thumbnail viewer that things get a bit slow, which could easily be remedied do with an improved caching function.

Another of Irfanview’s crowd-pleasing talents is its ability to handle an enormous range of different file formats, including g, somewhat rarely, icon (.ico) files. Unlike many of its rival tools, Irfanview doesn’t try to impose itself as the default viewer for all image types, giving you the option to specify the formats you wish to associate with it for yourself.

The program’s functionality can be expanded by installing plug-ins that allow Irfanview to open other file types, such as movies and audio – again a unique feature among photo viewers. You also get a smattering of basic editing features such as crop, rotate, flip and resize, along with some bread-and-butter effects like blur and sharpen, plus a smart crop function.

Upon first try, many users might be put off by the somewhat basic interface and the fact that it loads new images externally, rather than within the GUI itself. Nevertheless this is a small sacrifice to pay for a program that proves to be probably the quickest way to view images on your PC.

Download IrfanView 4.35 in Softonic

Photo Pos Pro is a complete photo editor that meets all your needs regarding photo editing, image optimization and special effects.

The program's interface is cluttered with icons and buttons - which makes a bit confusing to use at first sight - but the number of tools and features included in the program is impressive. With Photo Pos Pro you'll be able to not only edit photos and optimize your pictures but also add special filters and effects to them in order to create true pieces of art. Besides editing images, you can also create new graphic compositions from scratch and use Photo Pos Pro to design logos, banners, websites and anything you want.

Photo Pos Pro works with layers, masks, gradients and textures, and supports a wide range of scanners and digital cameras, as well as the most popular graphic formats. The program's interface enables you to open several documents at the same time and undo and redo actions as many times as you need to.

In spite of not having the best interface in the world, Photo Pos Pro is a complete photo editor that can help you edit and optimize your pictures, and add some special effects as well.

Download Photo Pos Pro 1.88 in Softonic

The application allows creating from elements of Web pages as banners, backgrounds, headings, buttons, navigation panels, textures to whole professionally executed Web sites. Application can be used for photo processing. You can to use about 200 graphic filters and transformers for this. Adjustment of colors is carried out simultaneously on 12 parameters. The program provides effective methods for selection of image area and application of graphic filters to selected area. Unique method of raster transformation let you to create portraits on base of photo. Images Generator can be used as images storage. Distinctive feature thus is that not only a rectangular raster of the image, but also color of transparent points of a raster is stored.

In Images Generator the small sizes and convenience of using are combined with ample opportunities. Such characteristics are provided by new following methods. Program let you to use a plenty of the built-in shape templates and to create unlimited amount of custom shape templates. Vector and raster images are used together with trajectories. The vector image in points of a trajectory can change the sizes and angles of turn. Unique method of transformation of rasters let you to enchance photo.

The program can be useful to any users of graphics such as designers, artists, schoolboys, students and science officers.

Download Images Generator 9.45 in Softonic

While the original Premiere application is mainly intended at professional video editors, Adobe Premiere Elements brings video editing closer to the average user. The program features a complete set of simple yet powerful tools that will help you extract video from several sources, combine them into a movie, add special effects and filters and share with family and friends.

The interface in Adobe Premiere Elements is very similar to that in Adobe Photoshop Elements. The application is divided into two main parts: the Organizer and the Project editor. Both work seamlessly with each other and share the same sleek, elegant dark interface.

The Adobe Premiere Elements Organizer lets you browse your media (photos, audio and video), rate them and add captions to them. The Editor, on the other side, is where the creative part comes in.

The editor in Adobe Premiere Elements features the classic video editing working space, with a special area for imported media, a built-in preview window and a timeline at the bottom. Though it may seem confusing and difficult to use at first sight, a bit of effort and patience on your side will help you master the program without much fuss.

Adobe Premiere Elements works with all popular media formats (including HD video) and features a bunch of extra material (special effects, transitions, graphics and text, menus, titles and more) with which you can easily create awesome movies.

Moreover, Adobe Premiere Elements also features all the necessary tools to share your movies, either by burning them to DVD and Blu-ray, or by uploading them straight away to Facebook and YouTube.

Adobe Premiere Elements is the perfect way to get started with video editing and the powerful tools included in the original Premiere suite.

Download Adobe Premiere Elements 11 in Softonic

Probably the most notable new feature is the Content Aware tool which makes editing Photoshop more "intelligent" plus there's a new design and a streamlined interface. In addition, basic video editing functions have been added for the first time.

When you first open Adobe Photoshop CS6, the most eye-catching thing is the revamped colorful user interface. However, if you don't like the new look, you can revert to the old grey interface via Preferences - Interface. Beyond this however, there are some useful new features.

Content Aware

Content Aware intelligently moves selected objects and adjusts them accordingly with the background or surrounding objects. This enables you to simply drag and drop objects in Photoshop much more easily without having to readjust the background. Don't like the position of a person in an image? Just move them to another position instantly and the background automatically adjusts.

Video Editing

Adobe Photoshop CS6 brings video editing to Photoshop for the first time. Its integrated with all of Photoshop's traditional tools which makes it very powerful when it comes to retouching scenes, adjusting colors and filter sets etc. It also allows you to add audio tracks although it's not very advanced otherwise.

Bridge file browser and Mini Bridge

Adobe Photoshop CS6 features a more powerful file browser which allows you to sort and manage pictures according to specific metadata. The fully integrated file browser with thumbnail previews photos quickly and opens them instantly for easier library management.

Adobe Photoshop CS6 brings some interesting new features to this powerful photo editing software. Particularly interesting is the Content Aware function which makes retouching and manipulating photos incredibly easy.

Download Adobe Photoshop CS6 Extended 13.0.1.1 in Softonic

Most photos acquired using a digital camera or a scanner are too large for use on any web page, they must be resized first. We have provided Able Photo Resizer to allow you to easily resize your photos in three easy steps. Photo Resizer includes the ability to batch resize pictures, batch resize photos, and perform batch image resize functions for the purpose of email (to friends and family) and web sites, or just to save space on your hard drive, or whatever reason you might have.

Simple, quick and easy tool to resize (reduce or enlarge) any single or batches of photos or images for the purpose of sending it by email, publish it on the web or just to save space on your hard drive.

Download Able Photo Resizer 2.5.9.0 in Softonic

Touching up photographs in a powerful program like Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom may be overkill for most people who aren't professional or amateur photographers. Programs like Toolwiz Pretty Photo simplify the process by giving easy to use presets for filters and effects.

While filters are all the rage these days, they aren't the only features that Toolwiz Pretty Photo has to offer. There are color, hue, and focus adjustments to name a few. Many effects give manual controls for more advanced users, though the novice can figure them out fairly quickly.

One thing that Toolwiz Pretty Photo is sorely lacking is a live preview of the changes to an effect. This makes adjusting something like blur very annoying. You have to re-drag the area you want blurred each time you make an adjustment in order to see how the blur changes. This makes editing photos take much longer.

While Toolwiz Pretty Photo brings nothing new to the table, it does offer users some great editing features that aren't included in other photo editors.

Download Toolwiz Pretty Photo 1.0 in Softonic

There are a lot of great image editors out there available to download. If you're looking for a new tool to try out, PictBear is a fine option that comes included with a lot of great features to help make image customization a breeze.

Support for layers is often a deciding factor for some users when it comes to choosing a particular image editor. PictBear does include support for layers, as well as brushes developed specifically for the program, which are available on the developer's website. This is an added bonus for people who want to merge images, as well as play around with different filters and hues in one photo that are meant to affect the one it's resting on top of.

PictBear also offers a whole host of filters that can alter the appearance of your pictures quite easily. You can crop out selections of image, resize, and rotate them whichever way you like. Like most image editors, there are also options to change the color balance, brightness, contrast, set it in grayscale, and make the image into its negative.

For users familiar with most mainstream image editors, PictBear is pretty straightforward, and its usability is a plus. New users might initially feel overwhelmed by all of the available options but should soon settle in and begin enjoying the experience of using PictBear.

PictBear is a great alternative to other, free image editors and paint tools for Windows.

Download PictBear 2.04 in Softonic

Windows usually comes with a dearth of apps out of the box but Windows Essentials 2012 solves this problem. It's a big download but that's because it comes with Live Messenger, Photo Gallery, SkyDrive, Live Mail, Live Writer, and Movie Maker. Let's take a deeper look at each program.

Windows Live Messenger

Windows Live Messenger hasn't seen much changed. There's tabbed browsing, Facebook/Linkedin integration, and the ability to log chats. The interface is almost exactly the same as Windows Live Messenger 2011. We would have liked to have seen some more changes to make Windows Live Messenger 2012 relevant in this crowded space. See our full review of Windows Live Messenger 2012 here.

Photo Gallery

Photo Gallery and Movie Maker are the highlights of Windows Essentials 2012 as they received the biggest overhaul. Both programs are now designed for Windows 8 in mind and feature the Microsoft ribbon interface.

You can now tag people in photos in bulk. There's still great social network integration for quick, seamless sharing. There is also a new 'auto collage' feature which blends photos you choose into one fluid picture.

SkyDrive

SkyDrive is perhaps the least exciting but necessary app included in Windows Essentials 2012. Similar to Dropbox's approach, SkyDrive creates a folder that syncs to the cloud and between machines. Make a change to a document on one machine and every other machine you have linked to your SkyDrive will update that document to the latest version. Integration is seamless and you'll soon forget about it, which is good.

Windows Live Mail

While competitors Apple has their default Mail application, Windows doesn't come with a mail client out of the box. Windows Essentials 2012 solves this by bundling Windows Live Mail. It is a solid mail client that offers a good way to manage your mail on the desktop.

There's an offline mode but Live Mail offers little benefit to those who want to manage their mail exclusively in a browser. The Outlook.com redesign helps to make the web site feel like an app so Live mail might not benefit users who prefer the web interface.

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer is the oddball of Windows Essentials 2012. It is basically a writing app that integrates with your Blogger, Wordpress, SharePoint, and other blogging services. You can write, attach photos, and edit the theme of your blog from the application but its features are limited enough that users may as well use the website to make changes. It's a basic WYSIWYG editor that lacks features that would be useful for intermediate and expert bloggers.

Windows Movie Maker

Last but not least, we have Windows Movie Maker, which is the stand out application of Windows Essentials 2012. This basic video editing tool remains great while offering a few new features.

Movie Maker now takes advantage of hardware acceleration, which will speed up video exporting and encoding. There is also a new video stabilization feature, which will be a boon to those with cameras that don't offer this feature. Videos now output to h.264 by default.

The interface of Movie Maker has stayed the same for the most part but integrating audio is easier as you can now look up music from services like AudioMicro, Free Music Archive, and Vimeo Music Store. The video timeline also features a wav form so you can easily see where audio is placed within the video.

Final Words

Windows Essentials 2012 is a great suite of applications that will satisfy most Windows users. While some of its included apps struggle for relevance, many included apps are actually very useful. Best of all, its free and you can select which programs you want to install so you aren't forced to install the entire Windows Essentials 2012 suite.

Download Windows Essentials 2012 16.4.3503.0728 in Softonic

Powerful drawing tools Get creative with powerful tools. Easily draw and edit curves, customize shapes to create designs fast plus experiment with one-click effects. Paint naturally Paint with natural media brushes like pencil and chalk. Plus add decoration to your designs with spray brushes. Pressure sensitive If you own a graphics tablet, calibrate your strokes in DrawPlus Starter Edition’s Pressure Studio for a more natural experience when drawing and painting. Blend modes Combine colors and textures in exciting new ways and create unique, professional artwork and effects. On-screen help DrawPlus’ ‘How To’ guides provide instant on-screen assistance whenever you need it, plus there’s a wealth of video and online tuto

DrawPlus X6 is a powerful, affordable and accessible solution for creating artwork, graphics and animations for the home, office and classroom. Whilst the heart of DrawPlus lies in vector illustration, a key selling point of the program over its competitors is its versatility; the software is also very capable for painting, sketching and photo editing. This all-in-one approach makes DrawPlus, outstanding value for money.

DrawPlus is an easy to use yet powerful graphic design solution. It is used by professional designers as well as small business and home users that want to create great-looking artwork for print or the web.

Download Serif DrawPlus Starter Edition 2.0.3 in Softonic

Ever get bored with unimaginative icons? Icon Craft can change all that.

Icon Craft is a full-featured icon creation and editing tool. It allows you to design and modify icons and cursors, both animated and static. You can also create icon libraries, download existing icons to modify and even make icons from photos and images.

Icon Craft starts by asking you to choose what task you want to perform. If you choose to create a new icon (rather than modifying an existing one), you’ll be able to select the precise measurements and color depth you need, ranging from 16x16 to 256x256 pixels, and from monochrome to True Color + Alpha (32 bits).

You will then be taken to an editing screen that allows you to control almost every aspect of icon creation. There is an extensive toolbar with drawing and text tools, effects, color options and pre-made shapes, among many other options. The editing window is nice and large for ease of use, and there are hotkeys available for almost every option.

Unfortunately, the Icon Craft trial version allows you to save only seven icons and irritatingly urges you to register at every opportunity.

Icon Craft is a comprehensive and fun tool for creating your own icons; it’s just a pity its trial version limitations are so obvious.

Download Icon Craft 4.61 in Softonic

It's designed specifically for use with images created in Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements and the latest version has been fully updated to make it compatible with the Adobe CS6 suite.

This means Perfect Resize now features a new scaling technology, faster performance and a completely new user interface.

Perfect Resize allows you to enlarge an image to any size or resolution you need but most importantly, it maintains fine image detail and eliminates what are known as "edge halos". Cropping and resizing is simple and you can do it within Adobe Photoshop CS6.

The only downside to Perfect Resize is that, although it's much simpler than most CS6 apps, it's still not something that beginners will pick up quickly. Fortunately, there are many tutorials on the developer page to help.

Perfect Resize will help you produce accurate and unblemished enlargements and give you professional results.

Download Perfect Resize 7.0.7 in Softonic

Flaming Pear is famous for being a prolific creator of cool Photoshop plug-ins and this versatile tool is another great addition to the developer's portfolio.

You can achieve some quite stunning visual effects, simulating many types of lenses within an intuitive working environment.

We love the way the program gives you as much or as little control over the effects as you desire.

You can either choose to experiment with the Latitude, Longitude and Spin settings yourself, or roll a dice to achieve random effects. This is a superb tool for getting unique lens effects on the fly as well as creating panoramic views.

Download Flexify 2.73 in Softonic

Photoshop is an unquestionably powerful graphic design tool. Plugins like India Ink only serve to enhance your design experience.

India Ink lets you convert your color images to black and white halftones, often giving your images a bit of an old world newspaper feel. In addition, the plugin also has special color modes that produce interesting effects. These effects many parts of an image the effect of having been etched or drawn.

If you're looking for new filter options for Photoshop, India Ink will give your photos a nicely aged appearance.

Download India Ink 1.997 in Softonic

Overview

If you've ever needed to convert or resize multiple photos at the same time, you know how long and boring it can be. Photo Magician is here to save you time and frustration.

With Photo Magician you can process images in batches, resizing them and converting them from one format to another in just a few seconds. Photo Magician includes a bunch of predefined resizing profiles to which you can easily add your custom ones.

How it works

Photo Magician is very easy to use. Select the folder with all the images you want to process, choose the new size and format and enable or disable the program's options according to your needs. You can set it to include files in subfolders or exclude files under a certain size, for example.

Once everything's configured, click the Process images button and let Photo Magician take care of the rest. The conversion process is surprisingly quick and the results are quite impressive.

Photo Magician is a quick, handy tool to convert and resize batch images.

Download Photo Magician 2.2 in Softonic