Web Talk

Some months ago I spoke of a nice freeware photo editor, which lets you wave goodbye those expensive, bulky, tricky to use software such as Photoshop. Today I want to speak about another freeware photo editor which promises you to be so easy to understand, that you won’t need any tutorial to start using it! Its name is Paint.NET and it is compatible with all Microsoft’s operative system including Vista SP1. It is also compatible with all the most famous processors such as Intel Core Duo and Quad. Pain.Net is able to manipulate all the major photo formats such as: png, jpeg, bmp, gif, tga, dds, tiff, pdn and psd. Its most important features include:

• Lots of special effects such as: 3D, rotate, zoom, brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, curves, and levels. You can also convert an image to black and white, or sepia-toned.
• Lots of tools such as: curve tool for drawing splines or Bezier curves, Gradient tool, Magic Wand for selecting regions of similar, Clone Stamp for copying or erasing portions of an image, text editor, recolor tool etc.
• History window. This features lets you roll back in case you made some mistake and you wish to go back to the last good known change.
• Lots of plugins. If you wish to expand the range of tools Paint.NET has got, you can download new ones here.
• Big community. Paint.NET has been created to be used right out-of-the-box. In case you don’t know how to do something you can always count upon a strong community reachable by clicking here.
• Paint.NET uses Framework to work!

ASCII Generator dotNET is a nice freeware software that lets you convert your most preferred pictures into high quality ASCII art. The idea behind this nice piece of software is to convert a regular picture into a tight net of small characters which, seen as a whole, display the image you have chosen to convert. ASCII Generator dotNET is only available for Windows Operative systems, supports variable width fonts, real-time output adjustment and is able to do most of the functions you can find in photo editors. Of course instead of changing the brightness of a pixel, just to give you an example, it will modify a character. To know more about this software click here.

PhotoShop has just unveiled and made available its PhotoShop Express web-tool. It was about time I dare say! A few years ago a lot of web photo editor tools started appearing on the Internet promising you to do whatever you want with your pictures. There are hundreds of them and I myself have already reviewed some. Now, even though with a huge delay, Photoshop has its own. I ask myself: what was it waiting for? Anyway lets see its main features. First of all let me be straight with you. If you are looking for something like the original Photoshop, then you’d better buy it. Yes, because this online version contains a few features to play with. As a matter of fact this flash based application has just 17 buttons for editing, a thumbnail to preview your modified pictures, 2GB of free space and import (from Picasa,Facebook etc). To start using PhotoShop Express you need to sign-up. If you want you can also have a free try here.

Are you tired with the face you have got, but you don’t have money for a nice plastic surgery? Then, Face of the future is for you! Thanks to this nice website you can see how you would look like if you belonged to another race, or if you got a nice portrait from some famous painter. It is sufficient to select the gender, age group and race of your face and upload the best picture you have, to start playing with it! Face of the future is a project by The Perception Laboratory and the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

If you need to edit some pictures but you don’t want to spend bucks on expensive software, then this online application is for you. In fact, Splashup lets you edit every kind of picture directly from your browser. No need to use any software. There are no limits to the source your pictures come from. They can be imported from your hard disk, Flickr, Facebook, Picasa or from a web address. As far as Splashup features are concerned I can tell you that they are quite amazing, without speaking about their level that can be considered professional! You can work with different pics at the same time and on different levels. You can apply different layers and filters such as: sharpen, blur, add noise, invert, desaturate, colorize etc. You can zoom in or zoom out, select, write etc. The things you can do are really, really a lot and best of all they are for free. To start using Splashup you don’t need to sign-up, just jump in, click here and start working on it! If you want to know more watch this video.

I have to confess that I didn’t know about this freeware software but I am impressed by its features and the fact that it comes for almost every O.S. It is a kind of Photoshop to retouch and manipulate your photos. Reading from its web-site, Gimp.org we learn that:

” GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.”

Get it now for free here or get tons of plugins here.