Keeping Windows continually optimized is an ongoing challenge and the worst problem is when software conflict with each other.

PCHeal is designed to step in when you've suffered a major software conflict or system slowdown. It makes direct changes to your system registry and files to enhance memory, screen drawings, animations, refresh rates and CPU threading speeds. According to PCHeal's developers, it automatically adjusts settings and changes made based on computer specifications although it's hard to tell if anything really has been done or not after running the program.

There is also a deep system analyzer and diagnostic tool in PCHeal which attempts to find and repair any potential problems with the computer which is affecting its performance. PCHeal also focuses on over-clocking features to enhance memory and CPU priorities and there's an easy and intuitive user interface which performs all setting changes immediately. In reality, in the case of a major software conflict, there's little you can do but PCHeal offers some hope of at least recuperating some of your system's performance without uninstalling the guilty products.

Worth a try if you've experienced a major system failure although don't expect it to perform miracles.

Download PCHeal 2.5.6.2013 in Softonic

Overview

A full-featured photo suite, Ashampoo Photo Commander doesn't just let you browse your photo collection, it also lets you view a full-screen slideshow, optimize images that need slight retouching, and use your favorite shots to create slideshows, albums, collages, cards, calendars and more. Ashampoo Photo Commander also includes a handful of filters and special effects to create original or artistic versions of your photos, such as sepia, pencil drawing, or oil painting.

Features

The interface in Ashampoo Photo Commander is divided into several tabs, each one of them serving a different purpose. You can browse images, apply a quick fix, edit, do something creative with selected photos and organize your collection in a more effective way with the Ashampoo Photo Commander batch processing tools.

Generally speaking, Ashampoo Photo Commander includes an impressive array of photo-oriented tools that let you make the most of your photo collection. In its ninth reincarnation, the program seems to have fixed its instability issues and runs a whole lot faster than version 8.

Ahampoo Photo Commander is a comprehensive photo suite that lets you manage, view, optimize and get creative with your pictures.

Download Ashampoo Photo Commander 11.0.1 in Softonic

Photo editing

Massive photo editing tools like Photoshop are great, but some find them too heavy and complicated for everyday usage. PicPick is definitely a better choice if what you need is just a simple image editor. With PicPick you can easily perform simple photo editing tasks, including brightness, contrast and color adjustment, grayscale, blur, pixelate and other special effects.

Screen capture

But PicPick isn't just an image editor: it's also a full-featured screen capturing tool with which you can capture the image on your monitor in several ways: full screen, active window, user-defined area and more. Plus, PicPick can work with several documents simultaneously and captures can be triggered with customizable keyboard shortcuts, which makes it even handier.

Other tools

PicPick has a selection of othet tools that you're not going to need every day, but when you do find yourself with a need to, say, pick a specific color on your screen, magnify something, or use a virtual whiteboard to "draw" on your screen. There are 7 of these tools, and although quite niche, they're a nice touch.

PicPick is a lightweight yet full-featured image editor and capturer, perfect for simple daily image editing tasks.

Download PicPick 3.2.4 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

Aviary Photo Editor is a straight forward and concise graphics editor for Windows 8. It doesn’t have the level of effects and customization as Photoshop or GIMP, but is intuitive enough for novice users. Aviary Photo Editor is powerful for a free app and will be a practical, no frills addition to your library.

Features

Aviary Photo Editor contains several staple features found in most image software. You can change a picture’s orientation, crop, or adjust contrast and brightness. Aviary Photo Editor has filters and effects to uniformly change hue or create lighting. These filters can be applied multiple times, further magnifying the intensity. Overuse of Aviary Photo Editor’s filters will quickly make pictures appear surreal or haunting.

There is a sticker option to add rasterized images such as hats, ties, and arrows. However, all of these stickers are so blatantly cartoonish that they contrast any photo, regardless of filtering. Aviary Photo Editor contains text and drawing tools, but the lack of feathering and limited color palate will generally result in unbelievable images.

Finally, Aviary Photo Editor has tools to remove red-eye, whiten teeth, and add blemishes. These tools have rather large diameters, making it difficult to precisely edit on smaller images. Aviary Photo Editor is better for fast and simple jobs rather than detailed projects.

Usability

Aviary Photo Editor’s layout is unusual for a photo editor. The image you’re editing in placed in the middle of the screen with the utility bar underneath. The most obvious omission is a lack of zoom or scrolling an image. This makes it very difficult to properly edit small images, or apply detailed editing to larger ones. Aviary Photo Editor's drawing tools only have six sizes, with the smallest size generally being too big for most jobs.

Aviary Photo Editor’s strong point comes from it other tools such as crop and sliders. The crop tool is separated into a three by three grid, making it easy to see just what will be included and cut. If you don’t wish to draw out an area you can also quickly select a preset dimension.

Brightness, contrast, saturation, and sharpness are all controlled by large sliders. Using these will offer a preview of the applicable adjustment. It’s very easy to back out and cancel any changes you’re not happy with. You don’t need to save or name any images as each job is saved automatically.

Quality

Aviary Photo Editor’s appearance matches other Windows 8 Modern UI apps. Large rectangular icons are presented against a dark gray background. As more edits are saved they will appear in a grid on the right. You can scroll through this to easily compare images or find what you’re looking for. The quality of finished images depends on the original image. Even without any save settings images are compressed into small size PNG files.

Conclusion

Aviary Photo Editor is a good editing tool for novice users that want to edit quickly. It lacks the detailed precision of other photo software, making it unsuitable for complex projects. If you want to simply crop, adjust levels, or change orientation and want good compression Aviary Photo Editor will prove to be a handy app.

Download Aviary Photo Editor 1.0 in Softonic

There are few things that Google don't do well and this even extends to making 3D art accessible to the most inexperienced artist in the form of Google SketchUp.

Google SketchUp bucks the trend of expensive 3D modeling software such as 3DSMax and Cinema4D and presents a free, easy to use alternative with which you can even post your creations onto Google Earth for the world to see. The latest version has been integrated with Google Maps too so that geo-tagging your creations is easier than ever.

There's a refreshing lack of technical jargon in Google SketchUp and unfamiliar terms to beginners such as the 'Extrude' tool have been renamed to the more obvious 'Push/Pull' for example. There are plenty of helpful hints and guides throughout too helping you get to grips with 'snapping' when you draw rectangles, circles and other shapes. Google Sketchup intelligently predicts where you want endpoints to meet and snaps them shut for you, saving lots of time messing around.

SketchUp doesn't lack in functionality though despite its ease of use and includes all the usual collection of drawing and filling tools you'd expect, neatly accessible in the toolbar across the top of the screen. Instructor hints pop out on the right of the screen when it thinks you need them. Other options can be accessed via the menu system, or you can choose to place extra palettes on the workspace to save wading through menus. Of particular note is the 'Materials' palette, which contains over 100 different preset swatches, such as vegetation, metal and glass. The Shadow Settings palette is also worth keeping to hand, as it allows you to apply realistic shadows via simple sliders.

The real fun however is when you export your Google SketchUp drawings into Google Earth. You can send images of your 3D designs via email or upload them for free storage at Google's 3D Web Warehouse. Alternatively, you can geo-tag them in one-step using Google Maps which has now been integrated into Google Sketchup. You receive a snapshot when you add a geo-location to your model which now includes 3D terrain data plus color aerial imagery.

There are some problems with Google SketchUp however. Most annoying is when trying to create domed surfaces because of the cumbersome nature of the Extrude tool, although pushing and pulling straight lines is considerably easier. Being free, it also obviously lacks some of the advanced features of many of its heavyweight rivals.

Google SketchUp provides a refreshingly simple approach to 3D graphic design and modeling and is ideal for non experts in CAD technology.

Download Google SketchUp 8.0.16846 in Softonic

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

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 4.4 in Softonic

The software is clearly different from others of the same type.Because the interface to work makes it clear that simplicity plays a major role in planner software

This piece of software can be used by any type of users who want to plan a project or solve a problem.

Download iWorkBoard 0.1 in Softonic

If you're a serious gamer then you'll need help to get the most out of your system and ensure your graphics card is performing to the peak of its abilities.

Similar to Game Booster, GameGain 2 is the latest version of the popular gaming assistant that attempts to take gaming to the next level. It can help you enjoy games like never before by using parts of your processor and graphics card that were formerly not in use. GameGain is quite easy to use and just requires the tweaking of a few throttles and switches to blast your PC into the gaming stratosphere.

However, GameGain should be used with a bit of caution because it does change registry settings and that could unbalance your system. GameGain works by making direct changes to system registry and files to enhance memory, screen drawing, animations, refresh rates, CPU threading speeds. GameGain's developers assure that it only optimizes based on the capabilities of your system and won't try and push it past anything it can't handle. If you do experience problems after using GameGain, the system analyzer should help remedy them.

GameGain might be considered a bit obsolete if you're a user who has the latest Intel Quad processors.

GameGain is a great tool for gamers who want to ensure their gaming experiences run smoothly

Download GameGain 2.9.24.2012 in Softonic

- Save the current desktop with your annotations as an image. - Record High-Quality video of entire desktop together with your annotation as a video. - Record your voice from the microphone. - Toggle between your desktop screen and a whiteboard/blackboard with just a single-click. Helpful when you want to quickly show your idea on a clean page. - Toggle the webcam view on/off for recording. For a video presentation, showing your webcam view might help you connect better with your audience.

- Let you write, draw or highlight on any content being shown on the desktop from any app, be it a webpage, a slideshow, a running video or even presentation mode of Powerpoint. - Allow you to annotate on extended or mirrored monitors.

Educators creating online lessons, corporate managers preparing their month-end sales presentation, or doctors sharing their findings with one another over email.

Download Ink2Go 1.6.0 in Softonic

Download Accelerator
With Avant Browser's built-in multi-threaded downloader, it's much faster to download files from webpage or your email box, and much easier to manage download files.

RSS Reader
With Avant Browser, you can easily switch RSS view in Outlook headline mode or full-expended mode. You can also choose to be informed whenever there is an update to the RSS.

Mouse Gestures
Got a big screen and tired of accurate clicks? With Mouse Gesture feature, you can control Avant Browser by “drawing” the command on the screen.
Mouse Gestures
Got a big screen and tired of accurate clicks? With Mouse Gesture feature, you can control Avant Browser by “drawing” the command on the screen.

Video Sniffer
Avant Browser can detect the videos in the web page you are browsing, and let you download them with just one click.

Mouse Gestures
Got a big screen and tired of accurate clicks? With Mouse Gesture feature, you can control Avant Browser by “drawing” the command on the screen.

RSS Reader
With Avant Browser, you can easily switch RSS view in Outlook headline mode or full-expended mode. You can also choose to be informed whenever there is an update to the RSS.
Avant is a multi-processing browser featured with Private Browsing, Anti-Freezing, Low CPU Usage, No Memory Leak, Web Form Auto-Filler, Online Bookmarks, Mouse Gestures, AD/Popup Blocker, Full Screen/Desktop Mode, Flash Filter, RSS Reader... Auto-Filler will memorize/protect passwords for you. You can fill web forms with Auto-Filler by a single click. Online Bookmarks allow users access their Bookmarks anywhere, office, home or an Internet cafe.
Avant is a multi-processing browser featured with Private Browsing, Anti-Freezing, Low CPU Usage, No Memory Leak, Web Form Auto-Filler, Online Bookmarks, Mouse Gestures, AD/Popup Blocker, Full Screen/Desktop Mode, Flash Filter, RSS Reader...

Download Avant Browser 2013 build 23 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

Overview

As one of the highly-regarded screen recording programs out there, Camtasia Studio offers a flexible, friendly working environment and smooth workflow that reduces the learning curve and editing time to the minimum.

It's actually quite easy to produce video using Camtasia Studio. Through the thorough documentation provided with the program, as well as an intuitive, three stage creation process that includes recording, then editing and producing, you'll be able to document your progress and also find help in the event that you end up getting stuck.

Creation process

In the first stage, Camtasia Studio provides you with a dedicated built-in tool to record images from your screen. The Camtasia Recorder features many different options to customize your recording settings: use the whole screen or a user-defined area, add cursor effects, record audio as well, and grab the image source from your webcam, among others.

The second stage that involves editing begins when your recording is finished. Camtasia Studio offers a varied range of tools to personalize your video. You can draw attention to a certain area with different callouts (including cool animated sketches), add more information with on-screen text captions or make it more eye-catching with transition effects, to name just a few. Both the Clip Bin and the Library in Camtasia Studio will ease the task of choosing media files to use on your video. The audio editor, on the downside, is a bit more limited, with only a few tools to level volume, reduce noise and optimize voice.

Finally, the production stage is last. Camtasia Studio makes it really easy, even if you've never used video editors before. Simply choose one of the included presets in the Production Wizard and follow the steps. Camtasia Studio will help you choose the appropriate codec, resolution, size and other details, and will finally render your video. And of course, you can export directly from Camtasia Studio to YouTube and work with HD video as well.

New features

Camtasia Studio 8 comes with a load of new features. Some are nearly invisible, fixes to bugs and other more "under the hood" tweaks. Others, such as the new ability to group and ungroup items on the timeline, will make your screen capture and recording experience a whole lot more user-friendly.

Even more than that, Camtasia Studio has added lots of new perks that'll give you even more ways to make your videos unique. Some of these include the ability to apply visual effects to an media on the timeline, the ability to adjust Drop Shadow distance, direction, opacity, and blur, and new borders that can now be added to any media, then later adjusted to the color and thickness of your choosing.

Whether you're out to make screencasts or just need a friendly and complete tool to record videos, Camtasia Studio is a great option for just about anyone.

Download Camtasia Studio 8.0 in Softonic

Many find it downright addictive! My Coloring Book features 19 great works of art by famous artists, and it offers interesting facts about each work.

And best of all, you can use your stylus to paint them yourself, right on the device screen. ** Requires a COLOR handheld computer ** ** Requires: SmartList To Go.

**Download My Coloring Book free trial version here and get a couple of pictures to paint. Registered version has 19 paintings. My Coloring Book provides a basic outline drawing of the painting, and an example of the finished work by Picasso or Dali.

You fill in the white space, just like with a real coloring book. The SmartList To Go image editor features many tools to help you create your work of art, including an eraser tool, various drawing tools, settings for 3 different drawing line widths and a color palette with 256 colors from which to chose!

You can save your partially finished painting and return later to work some more.

Download My Coloring Book in Softonic

You can draw freehand or use the tools to create images on larger screen estate and store them in notes. Freehand pen comes with various sizes.

Additionally, drawing tools are used to draw lines, rectangles, ovals, and circles. Pre-defined stamps make your task easier and result in more powerful notes.

You can create notes such as a scribble of a phone number or a number, a map showing directions to a place, or text lines for you to keep as your notes, etc.

All of these are only limited by your imagination and power usage of Note. Additionally, each note can have its own alarm. To remind you of tasks, each note can be set with an alarm at which time the alarm trigger will show the note image.

It's just like your own, completely customized and enriched alarm s_

Download Maxilaris Note in Softonic

Print records directly from your Palm using PalmPrint (www. stevenscreek. com) or use SmartList To Go Desktop software to edit and print notes, drawings, records directly from Windows.

Creates BW, 256-Color and/or 16-grayscale images. If desired, you can link hand-written notes sketches to records in your PDA address book. Your notes are stored in an alphabetically sorted database.

Download KwicNotes in Softonic

Download Xara Xtreme 4.0.1.5601 in Softonic

When it comes to editing images, there are massive apps like Photoshop with which you can do almost anything you can think of. But if all your photos need is a little retouch here and there, you may as well use a lighter alternative like StylePix.

With StylePix you can fix, optimize and edit photos in a simple way. The program's interface is not very attractive, but it does include some surprisingly powerful features such as support for layers, a handy history window, ability to process several images simultaneously and a wide array of special filters and effects.

StylePix lets you browse the content of your photo folders, but it's probably much more comfortable to see them in full screen (F11) or even make use of the Slideshow functionality included in the program (F5). On the downside, StylePix doesn't support as many formats as you would expect from such a complete app.

With StylePix you can browse, view, optimize and edit your photos in a very easy way.

Download StylePix 1.12.3.1 in Softonic