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a Freeware Drawing and Photo Enhancement program
PhotoFiltre is a fully featured photo retouching, drawing and painting program which allows you to do simple or advanced adjustments to an image and apply a vast range of filters on it.
PhotoFiltre was used to make and edit most of the images on this web site. It is a great program.
Selected features
- change the brightness and contrast of pictures
- change the colour balance
- apply any of a range of textured surface appearances
- cloning tool for removing unwanted detail from pictures, or duplicating a part of a picture elsewhere in that picture.
Examples: remove distracting background elements such as power wires and poles; duplicate flowers in blossom while keeping the background colouration and pattern. - apply filters giving oil paint, water colour, charcoal effects, etc.
- apply distortions such as fish-eye lens and perspective changes
- correct keystoned images
- red eye reduction
- selection tools include rectangle, ellipse/circle, triangle, rhombus, user-drawn, and many other geometric and pictorial selection marquees
- text insertion, shading, beveling, rotating
- cut-and paste images and selections into each other and to new images
- draw shapes and lines using a variety of drawing tools
- fill shapes with any of a range of textures, colours and patterns using customisable brushes spray cans, and paint pourers. Levels of transparency are adjustable
- save images in either BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF or TARGA formats
- resize images
- screen-capture images of windows or selected areas of the screen
- make textured and bevelled frames around pictures
- pixel edit pictures
PhotoFiltre was written by Antonio Da Cruz.
► Go to photofiltre.free.fr to visit the PhotoFiltre web site and download the program. It's a 4MB download for the standard program.
Additionally there are separate plug-ins which add more filters and features. Install the standard program first. Then you can revisit the web site to download and install some plug-ins.
The plug-ins are in zip files. That makes them suitable if you are able to unzip the files and move them to their designated folders.
The PhotoFiltre web site has a range of on-line tutorials to introduce you to the image creation and enhancement tools.
A limitation
PhotoFiltre uses a single layer of canvas. Images and text may be cut from or pasted onto the canvas or moved about within it. That's just like any other single-level picture editing program.
If you require a multi-layer graphics program like Photoshop Elements or PaintShop Pro, an excellent free one is Paint.NET.
Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.
It started development at Washington State University as an undergraduate senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it.
Originally intended as a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple tool for photo and image editing.
Visit their web site to learn more and to get the download if this seems to be more like what you want.
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| Back to Home Page | J B Whalley 2011-01-10 |