Photobie
Posted: Tue Jan 16, 2007 12:47 pm
http://www.photobie.com/
Claims to have a lot of features, most of which are rare or even unheard of in freeware editors (like creating animated GIFs). Looks very good based on the site, will post a review nce I've downloaded it and tried it out.
[EDIT] I've tried it out, and it's pretty darn good for freeware (even better than a lot of commercial programs). It has all the standard tools like brushes, paint, erasers, vector drawing, layers, advanced text (you can make text with textures, drop shadows, and other things). It also supports adobe 8bf plugins. It can open and save the common formats (jpg, gif, png, tiff, bmp, ico, and it's own format). The animated gif editing is pretty basic, but effective. Each layer in your image will become a frame in the gif. You can edit the layers in the program itself, and then use the animation control panel to set the display time of each frame. Unfortunately there are no optimization options, so all animated gifs made with it will be pretty large.
The one significant flaw in this program is that it doesn't give you options when saving (nor can you pre-set save options in a prefs dialog). For jpgs you can choose 100, 90, 75, 50, or 25 % quality (nothing in between), and other formats don't give you any options. In most cases, it'd probably be best to save the image at high quality, then use xnview to optimize it.
Claims to have a lot of features, most of which are rare or even unheard of in freeware editors (like creating animated GIFs). Looks very good based on the site, will post a review nce I've downloaded it and tried it out.
[EDIT] I've tried it out, and it's pretty darn good for freeware (even better than a lot of commercial programs). It has all the standard tools like brushes, paint, erasers, vector drawing, layers, advanced text (you can make text with textures, drop shadows, and other things). It also supports adobe 8bf plugins. It can open and save the common formats (jpg, gif, png, tiff, bmp, ico, and it's own format). The animated gif editing is pretty basic, but effective. Each layer in your image will become a frame in the gif. You can edit the layers in the program itself, and then use the animation control panel to set the display time of each frame. Unfortunately there are no optimization options, so all animated gifs made with it will be pretty large.
The one significant flaw in this program is that it doesn't give you options when saving (nor can you pre-set save options in a prefs dialog). For jpgs you can choose 100, 90, 75, 50, or 25 % quality (nothing in between), and other formats don't give you any options. In most cases, it'd probably be best to save the image at high quality, then use xnview to optimize it.
