14 DAY TRIAL // Photo editing is no longer an intimidating domain where only professionals can pull the strings to transform images into upgraded products ready to be exposed or shared on social media platforms. This is because the user interface has become friendlier over the past years. PhotoDemon is one of those graphic editors that provide intuitive looks and a notable collection of special effects, filters and color corrections.
PhotoDemon is open source, free and portable, and can be run on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8. You can take advantage of the tool’s portability status and transfer it to USB flash drives. You can open it on the target system without administrative privileges.
Importing/exporting options
The tool lets you work with a wide range of file formats, such as BMP, DNG, EMF, GIF, HDR, ICO, JP2, JPEG, PCD, PCX, PDI, PIC, PNG, PSD, RAS, RAW, and SGI. Pictures can be imported from the clipboard, camera or scanner, or downloaded from a user-defined link.
You may also take screenshots by capturing the entire desktop or a specific program that runs on your computer. PhotoDemon can be automatically minimized before capturing images, and you may include or exclude window borders and preview the snapshots in a dedicated window.
When it comes to saving options, you can print or export the edited photos and screenshots to BMP, GIF, HDR, JPG, JP2, JXR, PDI, PNG, PPM, TGA, TIFF, and WEBP. A lossless copy of the picture can also be saved.
Clean looks
Sporting a user-friendly interface, PhotoDemon provides an easy way of editing pictures without having to possess advanced image processing skills. Pictures can be dragged and dropped directly in the main window. In case you add multiple items, you can preview and switch between them via the thumbnail display mode.
Viewing options allow you to zoom in or out of the picture and fit the photo to the screen. A toolbox in is integrated in the main window to help you create, open, delete or save items, undo or redo your actions, as well as select objects using different modes, namely rectangle, oval, line, polygon, lasso and magic wand.
Each selection mode can be customized by highlighting the target area with a custom color, adjusting the transparency, and rounding the corners.
The GUI is quite flexible because you may hide or show several elements, like the toolbox, layer panel, and thumbnails preview window. You can also detach the toolbox and layer panes from the main window and make them floatable (they can be placed anywhere on your desktop).
There’s no support for a help manual, only a list of all of the tool’s features, screenshots and short descriptions on its official website.
Layer and image manipulation tools
PhotoDemon gives you the freedom to adjust the opacity of the current layer and merge, duplicate or delete it. Plus, you can resize, rotate, flip or straighten the layers, as well as cut, copy, paste or delete them.
When it comes to image editing functions, you can crop them to the selection, trim empty borders, rotate or flip them, generate photos with a specific number of tiles, duplicate images, and adjust the size of the canvas.
Resizing options can be applied by altering the width and height in pixels, inches, centimeters or percentage values, and changing the resolution and resampling quality. Plus, you can count the unique colors detected in a photo and view metadata (e.g. filename, size, type size, color components).
Batch processing can be used in order to apply different editing actions (e.g. fix exposure and lighting problems, resize images) or rename and convert files to other file formats. You may also record macros and import them for executing multiple custom editing actions.
Files can be renamed by adding ascending numbers and prefix/suffix, removing custom text, replacing spaces with underscores, and converting text (including extensions) to lowercase or uppercase.
Color adjustments, effects and filters
The simplest way of boosting the quality of your images is to rely on the automatic correction and enhancement modes that can be applied to color, contrast and lighting problems.
Other adjustments help you perform corrections related to black and white, brightness and contrast, color balance, curves, levels, vibrance, and white balance. You can also work with an image channel mixer, color alterations, histogram, inversion, as well as lighting and monochrome rectifications.
Photography tools can be applied for changing exposure, quality and strength of HDR files, and applying various image filters, such as pale yellow, deep orange, light blue, and amber.
A handy feature incorporated in PhotoDemon allows you to check out an undo history with all your past editing actions and restore photos to the selected state.
The effects are grouped in different categories, namely Artistic (e.g. Colored pencil, Comic book, Film noir, Oil painting, Posterize, Modern art), Blur (e.g. Box, Gaussian, Motion, Radial, Surface), Distort, Edge, Light and shadow, Natural, Noise, Sharpen, and Stylize (e.g. Antique, Solarize, Diffuse).
The aforementioned options come with their own parameters for fine-tuning, and you can even define your own custom filter. Image adjustments can be previewed before being activated. You do not need to tweak the fine-tuning parameters over and over again, as the program lets you save each configuration to a preset option.
Plugin manager and general configuration settings
PhotoDemon comes with support for a plugin manager that helps you enable or disable plugins, and tweak their options.
General configuration settings can be applied to the canvas background color and maximum number of recent files. Upon importing images, you can make the app count unique colors to determine optimal color depth, display tone mapping options when adding HDR and RAW files, and rotate files according to the info saved inside the images.
The tool is able to warn you upon unsaved changes and lets you define the color depth of the saved files and default file format. Performance parameters give you the possibility of prioritizing speed or quality when carrying out several tasks.
The Good
The Bad
Although there’s support for a function that allows you to check what the image looked like before applying a certain filter, I did miss working with a dual-panel preview panel where I could check the difference between the original and edited item side by side.
PhotoDemon is not one of the most advanced graphic editors, as it does not allow you to alter metadata, export edited files to PDF file format, use painting and drawing tools (e.g. pencil, paintbrushes), share files directly to social media and online photo galleries, create photo albums for organizing items, assign ratings, and search for photos based on size, date, time and extension criteria, just to name some suggestions.
