Graphics

About a year ago, I reviewed SnIco Edit here at Software Gadgets. It was a nice little icon editor, however, its web site has disappeared and I've recently found an icon editor I like much better: IcoFX.

From the IcoFX web site:

IcoFX is an award winning freeware icon editor. It is an all-in-one solution for icon creation, extraction and editing. It is designed to work with Windows XP and Windows Vista icons supporting transparency.

The latest update of Picasa, Google's wonderful image viewer/organizer is available. The new features in version 2.7 are:

* New RAW processing engine with support for more cameras and improved color.
* New color engine for "tuning" fixes.
* Added support for Google Photos Screensaver.
* Improved BlogThis! reliability.

The improved RAW support will make many digital camera owner very happy.

Operating System: Windows, Linux
Price: Free

ImageTasks is a jack of all trades image application that might be especially useful for anyone making HTML image ablums as it can batch process images and then generate an ablum ready to be uploaded to your web site. From the ImageTasks web site:

ImageTasks is a powerful tool for editing, adjusting, converting images. It also includes Batch Edit for processing large sets of images, HTML Album for generating albums ready to be published on the web and Desktop Extensions for customizing look and feel of your desktop.

My favorite freeware graphics viewer, Irfanview, has just received its latest update, from version 3.99 to 4.00. According to the Irfanview web site, the following "major" changes were made in this new version:

* Improved Vista compatibility
* New display option: Center image in window (Menu: View->Display options)
* Toolbar skin option added (Properties->Toolbar)
   More Toolbar skins are available on the IrfanView homepage.
   => Users can send new Toolbar skins by email, Thanks guys!

Deep Paint 2.0 is an older version of Deep Paint 3D which Right Hemisphere USA has made available as freeware on Download.com. Deep Paint, like Corel Painter, is intended to allow an artist to paint on the monitor screen like they were painting on canvas. This program once sold for a few hundred dollars.

Right Hemisphere describes Deep Paint 20 as follows:

I discovered Mapwing when a friend of mine used this online application to show pictures of her garden from a map of her backyard. It put everything in context quite nicely. If you have pictures that tell a story, you can use Mapwing to display those pictures in a way that tells that story.

From the Mapwing web site:

Mapwing makes it easy to build, share, and explore virtual tours. Use Mapwing to turn your digital photos into virtual tours that include interactive maps, images, and comments.

Have you ever needed to find colors that will work good with an image, perhaps a logo or other image you need to design a web site's color scheme around? If you are not good with color, this can be a long and frustrating process of trail and error. The Whats Its Color web site makes this much easier.

The process is simple, you upload your picture (a gif, jpg, jpeg, or png file under 1 meg in size) to the web site. Answer a question about the image size and whether or not its background should be ignored and press a button.

Paint.NET started life as undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft intended to merely produce a free modern replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows. The feature set has expanded. While it isn't ready to replace Photoshop, it has become a simple but powerful tool for photo and image editing.

Paint.NET 3.0 was released yesterday.

As regular readers of this blog may remember, Irfanview is my favorite graphics viewer. You can read why I like it so much in my original review. I've tried a few more graphics viewers since that review and Irfanview is still my favorite. It's, small, powerful, easy to use, and free -- what more could one ask for? Apparently, many people ask author Irfan Skiljan for more every day, as new versions packed with more features roll out a couple of times every year.

The following posts were made in the old Thingamablog version of this blog, the read more links will take you directly to them.