Note: this is an old article! PhotoDemon now has its own website at photodemon.org.

PhotoDemon 5.2 beta 1 screenshot

It’s time for another PhotoDemon update. This update includes many new tools, including PhotoDemon’s first on-canvas tool - “Selections”.

Summary

PhotoDemon 5.2 is nearing completion, and I need help testing it.

Version 5.2 provides a bunch of new features, including selections, cropping, HSL adjustment, CMY/CMYK rechanneling, a new Sepia filter (based off the W3C standard), an overhauled preferences engine and interface, and more. Please download the beta and help me make sure everything is working properly.

Download

Download PhotoDemon v5.2 beta 1 (1.6mb - 12 Nov 2012)

Remember - if you are an advanced user, you can always download the most recent development build of PhotoDemon’s source code from its GitHub page.

List of what’s new and improved in v5.2 (so far)

  • Selection tool! It’s a hell of a tool, and a lot of work went into making it as user-friendly and powerful as possible. Three render modes are provided. On-canvas resizing and moving are fully supported as well. Everything in the Color and Filter menus will operate on a selection if available, as well as the Edit -> Copy command. (Note: as of this beta, selections are not yet tied into Undo/Redo, and selections will not be recorded as part of a Macro.)

PhotoDemon Selection Tool

Here’s an example of the selection tool in action. Note that the HSL adjustment tool is only operating on the selected area.

  • Image cropping is now possible via the Crop-to-Selection option (in the Image menu).

  • New HSL adjustment tool. (See above screenshot for sample.)

  • New Rechannel tool. Live previews, CMY, and CMYK color spaces were added.

  • New Sepia filter based off the official W3C formula (available here). I still prefer PhotoDemon’s “Filters -> Antique” effect, but felt it was worthwhile to make both available.

  • Vast improvements to PhotoDemon’s support for images with transparency. Images with alpha-channels will now be rendered as alpha in all filter and tool screens. When printing, saving as 24bpp, or copying to the clipboard, the image will be composited against a white background. User preferences were also added for transparency checkerboard color and sizes.

  • All-new User Preferences dialog. Many new options were added, and the Preferences interface is now sorted by category.

Interface-related options in the new Preferences dialog.

As another example, here are the afore-mentioned transparency handling options.

  • Improved font rendering is now available for users on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8.

  • A drop-shadow can now be rendered between the image and the canvas (similar to Paint.NET).

  • PhotoDemon is now capable of remembering its window size and position between sessions.

  • Multiple monitors are now supported by the Import -> Screen Capture tool.

  • Many miscellaneous interface improvements. Additionally, I am testing a new layout in the Color -> Grayscale tool. This layout style is intended to help users make sense of PhotoDemon’s many options. Let me know what you think, because if this style is popular, I will redo the other tool dialogs to match.

  • Heavily optimized viewport rendering. PhotoDemon now uses a triple-buffer rendering pipeline to speed up actions like zooming, scrolling, and using on-canvas tools like the new Selection Tool. Even when working with 32bpp images, all actions should render in real-time on any modern system.

  • Bilinear interpolation is now used in “Convert to Isometric Image”. This results in a much higher-quality transform. Hard edges are still left along the image border to make mask generation easy for game designers.

  • Many bug fixes and miscellaneous improvements. For complete details, please visit the commit log at https://github.com/tannerhelland/PhotoDemon/commits/master