The developers behind open source the image editing application GIMP have released a major update. GIMP 2.6 includes a number of changes to the user interface and tools and plugins. There are a also a few important changes under the hood.
One of the most noticable changes is that the main menu items have been moved from the toolbox window to the image window so that you can access most options in one place. Another major change is the ability to pan beyond the border of an image. The free select tool has been tweaked so that it now supports polygonal selections, and there are new brush dynamic options that let you tweak the size, opacity, pressure, and velocity of brush strokes. GIMP 2.6 also uses GEGL for processing most color operations.
You can find a complete list of changes in the release notes.
GIMP 2.6 is available for download via FTP. It's not yet available in the Ubuntu repositories, and there's no Windows installer yet, so you might want to wait a while before installing GIMP 2.6 unless you're comfortable compiling applications from source.
IrfanView is a light-weight, but powerful Windows tool for viewing and editing pictures. Version 4.20 is out, and it has a slightly new design, a bunch of bug fixes, and some new features.
At its heart, IrfanView is an image viewer with some editing functions thrown in for good measure. Nobody will mistake it for PhotoShop anytime soon. But you'd be surprised just how much you can do with this free utility.
First of all, IrfanView can handle pretty much any image file type you throw at it. But second, it includes a ton of basic options for editing images, including cropping, resizing, rotating, and applying effects like sharpen, blur, and red eye reduction. Version 4.20 includes a ton of updates, including improved relative zoom, an "auto crop borders" feature which removes outside lines of the same color, and a shiny new icon set.
Twins Visions is a new desktop image manager and editor that's sort of like Picasa if Picasa had image editing capabilities, prettier visualizations, and the ability to occasionally crash your computer. Let's start with that last part first. Twins Visions is beta software, and while it works fine most of the time, we did see our first BSOD in months while testing it out.
But if you're okay with installing buggy beta software on your PC, Twins Visions is worth checking out. The program lets you do all the usual things like sort and display your images or play slideshows. But it also features a nifty 3D picture viewer that lets you sift through images in multiple folders and even drag and drop images from one folder to another.
Twins Visions also features basic image editing tools like resizing, cropping, or adding effects like grayscale, pixelizing, or embossing images. You can also enable Flickr integration for viewing and editing your images saved on Flickr.
The public beta expires on October 1st. We're going to go out on a limb and guess that at that point you'll either be able to pay for a commercial version of the application or download a new beta. But for the next few months at least, you can try out Twins Visions for free.
Online image editor Picnik has always offered two tiers of service. Free users could access most of the popular image editing tools, while paid subscribers got a few extra bells and whistles and access to early beta features. But up until this week, there were no ads on the site whether you paid for an annual subscription or not.
Yesterday, Picnik decided to take all of the editing tools that had been available only to Premium members and offer them for free. This makes Picnik one of the most advanced free photo editors around, and puts the company in a good position to compete with FotoFlexer and the upcoming Adobe Photoshop Express.
But Picnik isn't getting rid of paid memberships altogether. You an still shell out $25 per year to get early access to new features, the ability to edit in a full screen mode, and an ad-free interface.
Ever want to add a powerful image editing application to your web site, but didn't have the time or expertise to develop your own? No problem. Picnik, which recently announced a partnership with photo sharing powerhouse Flickr, has launched an API which should make it possible for pretty much anyone to integrate Picnik's online image editing application with their site.
Using the Picnik API, you can let visitors to your web page load, edit, and save images using the Picnik interface, all without leaving your site. You can also build web applications around Picnik. For example, Better or Worser is a site that challenges users to use Picnik tools to improve upon images uploaded by other users.
While you're waiting for Adobe to release Photoshop Express, you might want to take a look at Splashup. This web-based image editor has all your usual features like resizing, cropping, and some basic effects like sharpening, blurring, and pixelizing. But there are also some pretty advanced color controls and you an even use layered effects.
Splashup runs in Flash, so you should be able to use it with any web browser on any operating system. Unfortunately we were unable to get it to load an image properly using our new Eee PC (pictured above). That's a shame, because when you've got a portable web-enabled Linux computer with only 4GB of flash memory, that last thing you want to do is bog it down by installing applications. For now we'll just have to keep using Picnik and Snipshot to do our image editing on the go.
If you've been thinking it's been a while since GIMP 2.2 was released, you're right. It's been three years since the GIMP team has pushed out a major update to the open source Photoshop alternative. This week, GIMP 2.4 was released, with a new icon set, and a whole slew of other features:
Redesigned crop, selection, and align tools
Scalable bitmap brushes
Reorganized menu layout
Improved display when zooming in or out
Support for more file formats
Full support for color profiles
Improved printing
Auto red eye removal tool
There are a ton of other new features and updates. You can read about them in the release notes.
A few months ago we got a chance to talk with Picnik co-founder Mike Harrington (with an H) about the online photo editing application. He mentioned that the company was working out deals to place an "edit this picture with Picnik" button to online image websites. Now Techcrunch's Mike Arrington (without an H) reports that Picnik has landed one heck of a deal: Flickr will be adding Picnik integration soon.
Picnik already lets users import pictures from Flickr. But Flickr currently has a much, much larger user base than Picnik. The deal will give Flickr users the ability to do some advanced photo editing, while it will give Picnik a huge publicity boost.
Picnik comes in two flavors. There's a free version with a limited feature set (although you can still do all the basics like cropping, resizing, and applying many digital effects), and a subscription version that will set you back $25 a year.
You don't need a tank to drive down the street. And sometimes you don't need Photoshop to edit a photo. IrfanView is one of our favorite light weight image viewing/editing applications. Need to open an image, view a slideshow? Check. Want to crop, resize, pixelize, blur, or brighten a photo? Check.
This week IrfanView released version 4.10. The latest update includes support for even more file types and comes packed with new editing features:
New paint plugin that lets you draw lines, circles and boxes on an image (just hit F12 to bring up the paint menu)
Support for embedded color profiles in JPG/TIF files
Lossless JPG Crop added
Support for FLV files
Auto adjust colors on selected portions of an image
A bunch of other bug fixes, tweaks, and new features for editing, opening, and viewing images and multimedia files.
And best of all, you can open and close IrfanView a few dozen times in the amount of time it would take you to load Photoshop. Oh yeah, and it's free. That's nice too.
Photoshop Express is flash-based and runs inside of a web browser. No surprises there. And also nothing particularly unique. The online image editing space is getting pretty crowded. But while PikiFX, Picnik, SnipShot and Fixr each have tools that let you manipulate images online, none has the name recognition of Adobe.
As the name suggest, Photoshop Express might not be as powerful as the desktop version of Photoshop. But the web version looks like it should have just about anything the amateur photographer would need to make snapshots look better. You can rotate, crop, auto-correct, reduce redeye, and selectively change one color without affecting other colors in the image.
Adobe hasn't announced a release date for Photoshop Express. But to tide you over, CNet's Webware has a short video showing a few more features.
Paid subscribers get access to extra editing tools, effects, shapes, and fonts. The free service also got an update this week, with Photobucket support. Here's some of the new features available to paid users:
Photobucket support - edit photos from Photobucket and/or save your images to the site
Effect painting - choose certain effects and apply them with brush strokes
New effects including invert, pencil sketch, and pixelate
Add shapes, symbols, or speech bubbles
Touch up tool for whitening teeth or removing zits (from photos, not real life)
New image frames
$25 a year seems like a pretty decent price to pay when you consider how much professional editing software like Photoshop can set you back. And because Picnik is completely web-based, the company can continue to roll out new features for paid users without asking you to upgrade.
Eventually some of those new features will probably make their way to the free version as well. But you get what you pay for, and Picnik will most likely be using its free site to promote its paid services.
