Microsoft GIF Animator
An easy to use animator from Microsoft - and it's free. 1.05MB. Windows XP/Me/NT4/2000/98/95.
     Reviewed before 2002.8.8

Mirror drawing
This is a neat and small application that will give you a mirror drawing, symmetric view. You simply draw on one sheet and automatically you will get a symmetric mirror image on the adjacent sheet. Perfect for pattern making, or designing symmetric pictures. Very easy to use. Freeware
     Date Reviewed: 2005.08.01

Monitor Calibration Wizard
Calibrate the colors displayed by your monitor. Most monitors have flaws; they may be too dark, too bright, or have a color tint like pink, green, or blue. All these problems may be fixed. Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP. Free. 771Kb.
     Date Reviewed: 2003.12.14

NVR BorderMania
NVR BorderMania is a set of plug-in filters for popular graphics editing programs including Adobe Photoshop, JASC Paint Shop Pro and Corel Photo-Paint. There's a wide variety of button options available in this superb set of filters, including bevelled borders for round buttons, and they are absolutely free.
     Reviewed before 2002.8.8

Paint.Net
Students at Washington State University in co-operation with Microsoft have been working on an upgrade to MS Paint. They call it Paint.Net. The program offered free is seen to be of the same level of expertise as the major image editors such as Paintshop Pro and Adobe PhotoShop. Paint.Net features layering, without which you cannot do professional graphics. Paint.Net is basically image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run on Windows XP or 2000. Fully equipped with all the necessary tools and functionality, also with accessible source code, this is the prefect free application to substitute for all the expensive commercial image editing programs. Windows XP or 2000. 7.71MB. Freeware.
     Date Reviewed: 2005.04.18

P3dO Explorer 1.7
A very nice easy-to-use image viewer and multimedia manager for your digital imagery, is available here. Views, organizes, edits, and prints your pictures. Fast working. Real time 3D rendering and 3D files description. The programme offers interesting morphing techniques, e.g. polygon mode and promises a cartoon mode to be forthcoming. In digital photography, it supports all popular [40+] images files formats like JPEG, BMP, PNG, PSP, PSD, GIF, TIFF, but also the exclusive ones like Poser RSR, BUM and Vue d'Esprit VEG, VOB, VUE. Handy image previewing, zooming, mass renaming function, and a most pleasing whole folder hierarchy scanning, so all your pics appear at once. Win 95/98/Me/NT/2K/XP. 1.65 Mb. Freeware.
     Date Reviewed: 2004.11.16

PhotoFiltre
Here is an excellent image retouching program that allows both simple and advanced adjustments and includes many filters and features. Simple and easy to use with a fast learning curve. The quality of this application is right up there with the professional packages and has multiple language support. Not authorised for commercial use but free for private use. Windows 9x/NT4/ME/Win2k/XP. 1,5Mb. Freeware.
     Date Reviewed: 2004.12.19

PhotoPlus6
Photoplus is an exceptionally well equipped and user friendly photo editing software with all the features normally reserved for high-end, high-priced applications, this download is a win. Learn and apply professional image editing techniques and create incredible images for print, multimedia and the web. In addition you can easily edit or create animated GIFs for use on the Internet or in presentations. Windows 95/98/2000/NT 4.0/XP. 19.4MB. Freeware.
     Date Reviewed: 2005.04.26

Photoshop e-book -50 Fast Photoshop Technique
An excellent Photoshop e-book with step-by-step techniques to tweak, embellishes, and transforms photos. This is ideal for anyone interested in digital photography. Full of interesting techniques, from creating animations using digital photo's to making black and white prints from colored photographs. The techniques are applicable to images created with scanners or with digital cameras, and Photoshop users can create some outstanding results by learning how to use just a few features extremely well. Designed for inexperienced as well as experienced Photoshop users, and who have worked in a traditional darkroom for many years and now want to work digitally, File size is 32.3 Mb. Freeware.
     Date Reviewed: 2005.11.11

Photoshop Lighting Effects Filter
Here is a series of lessons on using some of Photoshop's more complex filter effects. The thought is that many of these types of filters have so many detailed controls that most people shy away from them completely, or they use them in a limited fashion. In response, this article was set up to look deeper into the various control options, teaching you to push things to the limit. The Lighting Effects filter, creates cast light and shadow effects across your image, treating it as though it were a flat surface. You can modify the color of the light, add multiple light sources, change the surface qualities of the image, and add various ambient effects as well. With a few tweaks you can even apply it to selections within an image, creating more of a 3D effect. Free.
     Date Reviewed: 2004.08.30

PhotoTree
PhotoTree is an image manager, and is an interesting and unusual application that stores photos in an intuitive treelike format. Each branch [known as a node] of the tree can contain a series of photographs, which you can view like an automatic slide show by running the Play Presentation command. You can if you prefer, click through the photos one by one manually. Something different to the usual image managers. Win 98/ME/NT/2K/XP. 7,12Mb. Freeware.
     Date Reviewed: 2004.09.09

Picasa
This is one of the nicest picture handling applications I have yet come across . It is extremely fast to use and you can instantly find, edit and share all the pictures on your PC. Every time you open Picasa it automatically locates all your pictures (even ones you forgot you had) and sorts them into visual albums organized by date with folder names you will recognize. You can drag and drop to arrange your albums and make labels to create new groups. Picasa makes sure your pictures are always organized. It also has simple advanced editing by putting one-click fixes and powerful effects at your fingertips, as well as e mail, print photos home, make gift CDs, instantly share via Hello, and even post pictures on your own blog. An absolutely delightful program. Microsoft Windows 98/ME/2000/XP Available in English only.Freeware,
     Date Reviewed: 2005.06.06

PicSizer
A batch utility that resizes images for use on the web and in email. It was designed with owners of digital cameras in mind, but it can also be very useful for designers and other people who work with images on a daily basis. It's the perfect tool for quickly generating screen-friendly versions of your images at dramatically reduced file sizes, and it's easy to use. PicSizer saves in JPEG format at any size between 64 and 1024 pixels, and reads files in .bmp, .jpg, .gif, .png, .tga, and .tif RGB formats. Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP. Free. 2.55MB.
     Date Reviewed: 2003.09.01

Pixel Ruler
Measure the pixel height and width of any element on your screen. This useful tool floats over your screen, works with all applications, and shows measurements in pixels. One may rotate the ruler to horizontal or vertical position, and it measures a maximum of 1300 pixels. Automatically detects English or French language. Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP. 498Kb. Free.
     Date Reviewed: 2003.09.08

Pixel Toolbox
Pixel Toolbox is a complete tool to design and create patterns, wallpaper tiles, icons, and cursors for Windows, providing a range of editing tools plus options like warping, gradients, selective fill, and added text. Create icons from 16x16 to 64x64, or 1 bit patterns, color patterns and cursors. The workspace is automatically customized for the job you are doing. Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP. 3.57MB. Free.
     Date Reviewed: 2003.09.05

Pixia-Painting Program
This is not a paint program, but rather a painting program. Its aim is to turn your mouse cursor into a paint brush, creating textured strokes as if using oil paints on canvas. Check the website for galleries, additional downloads and plug-ins.The original Japanese Edition was created and developed by the author, Isao Maruoka, and is quite unique and different from other tools. There are English, Korean, Spanish, Hungarian, Chinese, French, Polish and German editions. Windows 95/98/ME/NT4.0/2000/XP. Freeware. 3.3MB.
     Date Reviewed: 2004.05.06

PIXresizer
Resize your photos and change their format. An excellent tool for manipulating digital photos and most useful for creating Web ready photography. Convert between JPEG, GIF, BMP, PNG and TIFF. Rotate images, convert to grayscale, or use batch mode to resize many images. Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP. Free. 2.8MB.
     Date Reviewed: 2003.12.04

Powerbullet
Easy animated presentations for the web. Create a slick animated Flash presentation by typing, clicking and dragging. Drop in sounds and images from other sources. Paste in formatted text from other applications. If you can drag and drop you can use Powerbullet. Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP. 2.69MB.
     Date Reviewed: 2004.06.22

Programmers Icon Collection.
Some great icons here from PC World, including a clock. There's no doubt that quality icons enhance a software application, and these fill the bill! All Windows. Free. 13.8 kB.
     Reviewed before 2002.8.8

RahmanImager.
This application is an advanced full featured digital Image processing and Manipulation platform with support for layers, vast arrays of filters, Special Effects, Artistic Colorizing, Tools, optimizers an lots more. It is a good alternative to the expensive purchasable image editors. The application offers many of the features available in Adobe Photoshop, and is free for personal use. Techniques used here look to providing Images that have holistic refinement. Size adjusting, canvas, rotate, flip, crop, resample, antialias morphing, and transparencies features are available.Win98/Me/NT/2k/XP. 5,77Mb. Free for personal use. Found at: http://www.oriens-solution.com/rahmanimager/default.htm.
     Date Reviewed: 2004.09.09

RGBLab 2004
This is an absolute must for Web designers and application developers. More than a simple color picker, RGLab 2004 is a complete color manager. Every developer has battled at some stage or other to reproduce the RGB components of a particular color just right for the job. In RGBLab, you can save all the RGB colour codes for six different colours in twelve different formats, including a custom format composed by yourself, and you can save all this information in the form of a single text file. Such a text file can later be opened in RGBLab as well as in any text editor. You will have all the different colour codes for HTML, Visual Basic, Access, C++, Delphi, .NET, and Java in one place. Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP. Free. 1.72MB.
     Date Reviewed: 2003.10.07

SmartDraw
This award winning software is an essential tool for creating effective, professional reports. SmartDraw is the easy-to-use Windows program that lets anyone draw great looking flowcharts, technical drawings, web page images, and other business graphics. Features include drag & drop drawing, automatic connecting lines between shapes, and clip-art libraries. Works with MS Office. Best Business Program 1996 Ziff Davis - PC Magazine. Free trial version before purchasing. Windows.
     Reviewed before 2002.8.8

Smart Draw Image Plug-in
An interesting Image Plug-In free with the SmartDraw suite that will enhance your drawings with real photos. You can view, insert, and edit digital images from right inside SmartDraw. Using photos and other digital images, you can transform your diagrams from a representation of an abstract process into concrete communication. Enables you to insert photos into org charts. Enhance your flowcharts with real images, add photos to your forms and calendars Create descriptive flyers & signs with photographs. Use real pictures with your floor plans. A tutorial is given. Free.
     Reviewed before 2002.8.8

Smart Morph
Morph one picture to another or make funny effects with one picture. One can resize and crop the pictures to achieve best results. The resulting animation can be computed and displayed real-time or it can be saved to disk. Read/write BMP, WMF, EMF, JPEG, PNG, and PCX images. Animation output as AVI, BMP, JPG, PNG or PCX. Windows XP/Me/NT4/2000/98/95. Free. 951Kb.
     Date Reviewed: 2003.05.24

Smart Photo Statistics
This nifty piece of software enables photographers to gather EXIF statistics for their digital photo collection. The program scans a folder tree and generates a statistical overview for a variety of camera values, including model, f-stop, focal length, flash used, exposure and others. The statistics can be viewed as a text list or bar graph chart, and also exported as text or bitmap to the clipboard. Win(All) 670KB. Freeware.
     Date Reviewed: 2007.01.16

SnowScape
A PhotoShop compatible plug-in with which you can add layers of snow to your images. You can control the placement of the snow, the amount of snow falling down, how sticky it is and the color - so you can add alien goo, nuclear fallout, sandhills or anything else instead of the snow. Also works with Paint Shop Pro, Corel PhotoPaint and ULead PhotoImpact amongst many others. 405kb. Windows95 up.
     Reviewed before 2002.8.8

Sortpic
Very neat and well documented image viewer, image sorter, and duplicate detector. It's designed for people who have a lot of images to go through, and need to categorize them quickly and efficiently. Supports jpeg, gif, bmp, emf, wmf, and more! SortPics is intended to make the process as easy and fast as possible, setting up multiple banks for categorization and using such features as automatic duplicate file detection and one-click file categorization. Win 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP. 1.3MB. Shareware.
     Date Reviewed: 2005.06.17

Stamp
Manage photo, audio, and video files produced by digital cameras: Stamp downloads photos from your digital camera, extracting the date and time each photo was originally shot from camera-generated metadata, then adds a timestamp to the beginning of each filename. After running Stamp, you can sort your photos and videos by filename to view them in true chronological order - even if they come from several different cameras. Stamp works with all digital cameras, downloads files directly from many cameras, batch processes folder trees automatically, and is fast and safe - it will never alter or corrupt file contents. You get configurable options, filters, filename formats, and a comprehensive User Guide. Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP. Free. 1.99MB.
     Date Reviewed: 2003.10.19

Suzy'S Home of Graphics
One of the most delightfull collection of free graphics on the Internet, featuring backgrounds,Welcome signs,Bars and Dividers, Precious Moments, Angels, Bears, Cats, Flowers, These can help you with your web page.And best of all They are all FREE to copy and place on your page. Freeware.
     Date Reviewed: 2008.01.17

Tales Animator
An ideal software package for kids to create their own animated cartoons, and export in AVI format, and for adults to create animated presentations. Your kids can animate their favorite fairy tales easily. You don't need to be an artist to create a quality animation. Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP. Available in 3 versions, all free. A lite version, 2MB. A Standard version 7MB. Or a professional version, 17MB.
     Date Reviewed: 2004.02.15

Tapptoons Line Tester
An excellent entry level application for those who want to try their hand at animations that can be converted into AVI videos. 7 levels of animation, and sound may be added. Use drawings or photos input from a flatbed scanner, or images from a video camera with a suitable capture card. Software with this capability usually costs hundreds of dollars. Windows Me/98/95, not tested on XP/NT/2000 but may be OK. Free. 2.75MB.
     Date Reviewed: 2002.08.28

The Plugin site
A sophisticated filter plug-in for generating textures, surfaces, paint, erosion, transparency, edge, frame and shadow effects. These main effects are based on seamless textures, so there are unlimited variations possible. Additionally there are also zoom, rotation, metal, chrome, pop-art, warp, mirror, blur, noise, blending and other secondary effects which can be simultaneously applied to the seamless texture which is used for the main effect. So up to 20 different effects can be applied at the same time without leaving the plugin dialog. A super facility for graphic artists. Freeware.
     Date Reviewed: 2006.05.29

TeeChartOffice
This is a comprehensive package for creating any type of chart. Output is in your choice of JPEG/JPG, PNG (Portable Network Graphics), GIF, BMP (Windows Bitmap), WMF/EMF (Windows Metafiles), PCX, or VML (Vector Markup Language). Windows XP/Me/NT4/2000/98/95 1.1MB. Linux 1.3MB. Free.
     Reviewed before 2002.8.8

ThumbaWumba
Some Web development projects call for a page of thumbnails. The user clicks on a selected thumbnail to view the image full size. This little gem creates the thumbnails and the HTML. Just specify the source and destination files and you'll have it with a click. Image size and quality may be adjusted both for thumbnail and main pictures. The aspect ratio is always kept the same as the original source picture. The HTML code of the generated pages is configurable to fit the design of your existing pages. Choose from several resize algorithms for the image processing. Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP. Free. 1.04MB.
     Date Reviewed: 2003.10.09

Toolbar Paint
Toolbar Paint is specifically targeted at developers who wish to design their own toolbar button graphics. It can open toolbar bitmaps with up to 64 buttons and allows you to visually design a toolbar using a wide selection of editing tools. It also includes image manipulation tools to replace colors, apply gradients and more. The toolbar graphics can be saved as 16 color, 256 color, 24 or 32 bit bitmaps to incorporate in your application. A tiny and powerful editor it is written entirely in assembler. Additional plug-ins are available that let you save a button as an icon file, add additional effects, save the entire toolbar to an animated icon and more. Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP. Free. 54Kb.
     Date Reviewed: 2003.11.02

Tux paint
What a delightful little piece of software. A drawing program for young children, or anyone, for that matter who wants to learn how to draw on the computer. It has a very simple, easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who helps guide children as they use the program. It provides a blank canvas and a full variety of drawing tools to help your child be creative. Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD and Solaris. Open Source. 4,4Mb. Freeware.
     Date Reviewed: 2005.03.18

Twisted Brush
A lovely piece of digital paint software with a complete set of natural art tools. Designed for artists this application does away with the complexity of most computer art programs. Special emphasis is on the textured appearance of the materials offered. The Oils are rich with color. Airbrushes feather their spray the further they are from the page. A variety of blenders range from dry dust to wet to semi dry smudging. Chalk and charcoal are pleasingly chalky. Oil pastels mix and smear. There are wax and hot wax pencils, water colors, and many different textured papers. Incredible effects from this delightful site. Windows 95, 98, ME, Nt, 2000, XP. 1.792Mb. Freeware.
     Date Reviewed: 2006.11.05

Typoasis
A splendid resource for fonts and dingbats. Need I say more?
     Date Reviewed: 2002.12.09

Vas
Quite a unique application that places itself on your Start Button and is an enlarger or magnifier. It can be used to enlarge on-screen animations, capture video frames or as a reading aid. Zooms your cursor screen section up to 16 times magnification with 5 different paint speeds in real-time. There is a smooth edge option for easier viewing and a Click and drag screen capture to Clipboard function, Useful as a complementary tool for Animated ArtCard Creations. Win95/98/ME/NT/2K/XP/03 211 Kb. Freeware.
     Date Reviewed: 2005.09.09

Virtual Magnifying Glass
A magnifying glass for areas of your screen. Magnify from 2:1 up tp 16:1. See, with absolute clarity, each individual pixel. Windows XP/Me/NT4/2000/98/95. Free. 139 Kb.
     Reviewed before 2002.8.8

Visual Thought
Visual Thought is a cross-platform diagramming & flowcharting tool for the enterprise. Effortlessly create technical and documentation graphics, network diagrams, flowcharts, org charts, software design diagrams - UML, Booch, OMT, Objectory, etc. - circuit & logic diagrams and business and presentation graphics. Choose from a library of drag-and-drop palettes, or create your own with user-definable shapes. Edit your work easily with 100 levels of undo. Publish your diagrams into Word or FrameMaker documents or right onto the Web with GIF and JPEG output and instant clickable imagemaps. SunOS 4.1 and Solaris 2, HP PA-RISC workstations running HP-UX 9 or 10, Windows XP/Me/NT4/2000/98/95. 6.8MB. Free.
     Date Reviewed: 2003.06.12

Word Tip - Watermark
Here is a very short and simple instruction on how to handle and insert a watermark into your Word documents. I have been asked this and the following tip covers the procedure very nicely. The instruction is in a word document so you will be asked to either save or open when visiting this URL - we have checked it and the file is virus free.
     Date Reviewed: 2004.07.05

WebShots
Thousands of superb photographs, in small theme groups. Download a group of your choice, and install with a click a desktop photo and a slide show screensaver. We downloaded the space theme, a collection of stunning photos from NASA.
     Reviewed before 2002.8.8

WebSwoon
Still in Beta but Webswoon is like a screen capture utility on steroids. You enter a list of web pages you want captured and press go. Webswoon will either capture them for you automatically or you can do them manually. The images are then saved as either GIF's, JPG's or PNG's. Simple and very easy to use with lots of extra features. No more spending hours manually capturing different pages screen caps of websites. The main limitation is that it can only capture web pages and does not have any true screen capture functionality. Windows and Python versions. 3.9 Mb. Freeware.
     Date Reviewed: 2004.12.09

WinMorph
Morphing is the smooth transition from one image to another; e.g. a young woman into an old woman, or a man into a lion. WinMorph is the ultimate morphing software, used for the morphing title sequence of the hit movie Dreamcatcher, and downloaded by more than 400,000 users. WinMorph can work as a standalone, and also as a plug-in for Adobe Premiere, Vegas Video and Wax. Wax is included in the download. Tested on Windows 98/Me/XP. Free. 4.37MB.
     Date Reviewed: 2003.07.09

Zoner Draw 5
An update on Zoner 3, Zoner Draw 5 is a universal graphics editor which has a set of professional tools for achieving great results with drawings, maps, blueprints, illustrations, Web graphics, and so on. Digital Camera friendly and with lots of technical support, this is a vastly expanded version compared to previous versions. With sophisticated functions for editing bitmaps, and especially photographs. You can open up imported photographs in an editor with several different functions. It comes with advanced editing tools for adjusting exposure, removing image defects (including red eye), retouching, cropping, making parts of an image transparent,etc. Stunning image effects: oil-painting, antique-photo, pencil-drawing, grayscale, color effects, and more. Freeware.
     Date Reviewed: 2005.09.09

XnView
XnView is a utility for viewing and converting graphic files. Import 360+ graphic file formats, export 40+. Multipage TIFF, Animated GIF, Animated ICO support. Resize. Copy/Cut/Crop. Adjust brightness, contrast. Modify number of colors. Apply filters and effects blur, average, emboss, lens, wave etc.. Slide show. Picture browser. Batch convert. Thumbnail create. Screen capture. TWAIN support - Windows only. Print support Windows only. Drag & Drop support - Windows only. 36 languages support - Windows only. Windows XP/Me/NT4/2000/98/95, Linux x86, FreeBSD x86, Solaris sparc, Solaris x86, Irix mips, HP-UX, AIX. 1.79MB. Free.
     Reviewed before 2002.8.8