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Color Cop Drawing for Children The Gimp Google SketchUp Harm's sTile Image Forge Irfan View PhotoFiltre Pixia Paint Shop Pro 4 UnFreez Animator Vallen jPegger VicMan’s Photo Editor Xat Image Optimiser XnView
Below are links to sites where you can download free graphics programs or light versions of graphics programs.
As far as I know, none of these programs is accompanied by hidden nasties such as spyware. Nevertheless, it is always good practice to run SpyBot after downloading things—but it’s a good idea to run it when you’ve just been browsing, anyway.
These programs are arranged alphabetically; not in order of easiness or usefulness. The notes should suggest which ones would be best for your needs.
Color Cop helps you to precisely match a colour from anywhere on your computer. A little magnifier can be placed over the area you’re interested in, after which you drag an eyedropper onto the exact pixel and click. The colour is then recorded by Color Cop.
The program is tiny in window size—as well as on your disk—so there’s no problem in leaving it “Always on top” while you sort through other open windows. As a bonus, this program will also measure the width and height in pixels of a small area of your screen.
Drawing for Children An outstanding free program intended for small children, this has as many or more features than most children’s painting programs you can buy, and little people find it heaps of fun.
While children enjoy the stamps, clip art and zany patterns provided by the program, adults could easily manipulate the more basic tools—pencils, brushes, spray can, shapes, lines, fill tool etc—to produce some simple but original work. A full range of fonts and sizes is offered, with text effects including rotation! There’s a copy to clipboard facility as well as in-program printing.
When tinies are to use this program, it’s possible to simplify the available choices, as well as to have it running in “child-proof” mode—that is, full screen with no exit or print buttons available.
Gimp or, more properly, The Gimp, is not for the fainthearted or those without some time to spend in learning. It is, however, a very fine program with features you’d expect from PhotoShop—although the authors insist that “the Gimp isn’t PhotoShop”. It was really written for the Unix community, but the link above is to a version for Windows.
The Gimp home page has links to both a 900 page downloadable pdf manual and stacks of step-by-step on-line tutorials. The tutorials are under the link called Grokking the Gimp. The top of the page talks about buying the book. Go to Gimp Basics, a few clicks down.
Google SketchUp helps you to draw three dimensional geometric shapes, like houses and other buildings. It's jam packed with tutorials so that you can either do your own thing or follow a step-by-step set of instructions.
If you're being serious, you can draw to a scale—that is, type in how high and wide a shape is and the shape will adjust automatically. There are colours and textures so that you can indicate building materials—bricks, concrete and so on.
SketchUp only works with XP or 2000—or 10.3.9 if you're a Mac user. Also, at 80MB, the download isn't practicable for dial-up users.
Harm’s sTile is meant for creating, enhancing and testing seamless tile backgrounds, although, as the help points out, it’s much better to begin with a tile that is already seamless—the program can’t perform miracles. One thing for which it’s particularly useful is testing backgrounds. If you paste in a tile that you’ve already made, the program will show you how it looks as a full page background, and will display text of different colours against it, so that you can look for a good contrast.
When you set about making seamless tiles yourself, this is definitely one of the best and easiest programs for you to use for recolouring, blurring, embossing and applying various interesting effects.
Included in the Stile help are some lessons in making striking looking text. The instructions are easy to follow.
Some people have had trouble with the msi installation file. The author does explain how to deal with this, but you may find it better to download the zip file, which is the second one shown beside the Download heading.
Image Forge This image editor has many of the functions of some commercial programs. It is the junior version of a commercial program, but it doesn’t have a time limit. It offers pattern and gradient fills, painting with images, reshaping selections, universal and local colour replacement, cloning, smudging and blending. The producers say it’s “the only paint program some people will ever need”. The disabling of some features may prove disappointing, but it’s worth a look.
Irfan View is well known and much
applauded. I think it’s indispensible. It isn’t a program where you make a picture from scratch, but is used to view and adjust pictures. It reads 42 graphics formats, as well as 3 video formats and 7 sound formats. It will even show you what’s written in a plain text file!
It’s a polite program in that it doesn’t grab associations when installed, but offers a list of extensions from which you may choose any or all. Changing your mind about having Irfan open particular files simply requires removal of a tick from the
appropriate box.
Irfan will work with your scanner, either to
save images or copy them directly. It will let you select and save
separately a small part of a graphic, change colours, add effects
like those found in expensive photo editing programs, flip, rotate
finely, add text, adjust brightness and contrast, extract frames
from animations and make thumbnails. It will even, given a list of
pictures, generate a basic html file with thumbnails!
Photofiltre would be great for people just graduating from Paint. It's such a cool little program! It's truly easy to understand but has all sorts of interesting tools and effects that you'd expect in something you have to buy.
Primarily it's a photo-editing program, and it has everything you need for that, including clear instructions for red-eye reduction. Things like saturation and contrast are right on the toolbar, along with dust reduction, gamma correction, old photography—lots of things.
Apart from photo editing, though, you could use PhotoFiltre to make a picture from scratch. It has all the basic painting tools, plus textured backgrounds, special brushes, a clone tool, smoothing and sharpening, heaps of special effects filters—and there are additional plug-ins to download if you wish.
Pixia is a full-featured graphics program. It really is free for ever. As well as the usual help file—which is itself very clear and precise, it has understandable and easy to follow tutorials on all aspects of its use. I was particularly pleased to learn how to scan a newspaper cartoon and get a clean image, easily removing the off-white areas.
Layers are explained carefully, with plenty of illustrations. Colour is handled extremely well, in that different brightnesses of the same colour can be selected. This is great if you’re trying to clean the background from an image.
Pixia has a native format, pxa, in which unfinished work should be saved to preserve layers, but it also saves bmp, ico, jpg, png and tif as well as Fujifilm’s native format.
PSP4 is a program in which you can make and edit your own pictures or touch up photographs. It’s little brother to the much loved Paint Shop Pro, and the person offering this non-expiring shareware version suggests that you use this as a “try before you buy”. While this doesn’t have the bells and whistles of PSP7, it makes and saves jpgs, transparent gifs, and several other useful formats, uses masks and selections, browses a whole directory very quickly, and has an excellent screen capture module.
If you can understand and use Windows Paint, you won’t have too much trouble graduating to this early version of PSP. Many of the tools are similar, although more sophisticated. Line widths, for instance, can be anything from 1 to 100 pixels. Fills can be, as well as plain colours, graduated from one colour to another. You can choose a “surface” on which to draw, so that your work has a textured effect. Particularly useful is the “clone” tool, with which you can copy one part of a picture—some shrubbery, perhaps—onto and over an unwanted or ugly item in a different part of the picture.
This is a really good program for beginners.
UnFreez Animator It takes only a minute to download the 20kb zip file for the UnFreez animation builder. There’s just one file, but all the directions are right there when you open it. Just make two or three small gifs, drop them into the UnFreez window, say how long you want each displayed and save the finished animation.
VallenJPegger is particularly useful if you want to print small copies of many photos. With most programs there’s a lot of wasted paper, but JPegger lets you fill each page with anything from one to a hundred and forty-four separate images, provided that they’re together in one directory or folder.
One of the most interesting and unusual aspects of this free program is that it will assist you in filling a CD with images, with autoplay and, if you wish, your own spoken commentary.
VicMan’s Photo Editor is a neat little program that scans photographs and allows you to edit them or to make your own paintings from scratch. A pleasing feature is that each time you enter text you can opt to have or reject antialiasing (fuzzy or “smoothed” edges). The help file is clear and easy to negotiate. A slight drawback is that the free version doesn’t save in gif format, so if you want to retain sharp edges it’s best to click Edit > Select All > Copy, then paste into Irfan View and save. If you’re working on a photograph, though, VicMan does offer jpg as well as bmp and tif formats.
Xat Image Optimiser is for those who want to make their jpg files as small as possible, particularly if they’re intended to be sent in email or published on the web. It will help you to crop and resize images, and it will reduce the “quality”. This last sounds bad, but the sort of image that you’d use for high class printing is wasted on a computer—the computer can’t see all the detail, and the friend to whom you send the image may have to wait a very long time while it downloads. The picture will look the same, it’ll just take up less time and space.
The registered version of Xat Optimiser offers a great deal more, such as cleaning or brightening images.
XnView Another viewer and converter. I’ve only recently acquired this, but it looks good. It claims to read 400 formats! Saves in over thirty, including gif and jpg. Has slide show, browser, acquire image. Generates a linked page of thumbnails. Seems to have plenty of potential for exploration. It also invites the user to make, save and use a new “skin”. Could be lots of fun.