Photobie
Photobie is a free image editor that offers professional-level editing features, carefully documented in an extensive PDF file which is essential reading before you start. Basic facilities include crop, copy, paste, and rotate/flip, with dozens of painting tools such as pen, shape draw fill, airbrush, eraser, line/curve with arrows, and smudge. Image processing facilities include brightness, contrast, saturation, gamma, alpha, color swap and color curve controls. It also has screen capture, a plugin manager that lets you use free Photoshop .8bf filter plugins for special effects, GIF animation editing, a Flash Jukebox with a playlist manager, and tools for creating templates to share with other users.
To get full benefit from Photobie you really need to belong to the Photobie Club, the community of users who share their experiences, templates, and even some of their designs. The image editor itself comes in two versions: Photobie and Photobie Design Studio (Photobie DS), the latter being made freely available to members, although it may eventually be spun off as commercial software. The club, which has a highly active online forum, is free to join.
Comment
Photobie is not for everyone. It appeals more to amateur designers than photographers and its reliance on Microsoft's .NET framework has made it slow (slower than Paint.NET which much of the time uses direct pixel read and write access). However, it boasts well over a million downloads worldwide and is clearly a versatile product.
It is commendable for allowing the user to take advantage of Photoshop .8bf filter plugins for special effects. The developers are currently looking towards the scrapbooking sector with the aim of bringing traditional and digital scrapbooking together. They would be wise to focus on making the interface more intuitive, easier to read, and needing fewer rather than more instructions.
In many ways Photobie remains something of a "homespun" project, but with serious aspirations now that professional designers and software developers are contributing their support.
Tech info
- OS: Windows XP with .NET framework 1.1; (Photobie Design Studio) Windows XP with .NET framework 3, or Vista/Win 7
- Price level: Both versions FREE for personal use.
Photobie Design
Photobie software was originally designed by Cheng, later help by Odidio who also writes the animation tutorials. The team is based in Boston, Massachusetts.
From the same vendor:
- Photobie Templates
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