Portable PaintStar

This is the portable version of PaintStar - an application that provides several image editing features. It supports a wide range of formats, including JPG, PNG, TIF, GIF, PSD and BMP.

Since the app doesn't come with an installation package, you can simply run its executable file. You can also store the tool on a USB flash drive or any other removable device and carry it with you when you're on the move.

From the technical point of view, this is an advantage because the Windows Registry doesn't create new entries. Plus, no leftover files can be found on the hard drive after deleting PaintStar's directory.

The program's interface is based on a dull but familiar window where you can open an existing image via the file browser or 'drag and drop' functionality. When creating a new file, you must define the image size and fill type (white, foreground, background, texture).

PaintStar offers some basic picture editing tools, such as rectangle selection, zoom, crop, transform (rotate, scale, shear, perspective), eye dropper, fill, wrap, text, pencil, paint brush and filter brush, just to name a few.

The selection feature focuses on feathering, sharpening, shrinking and growing. Plus, you can add layers and paths, customize brushes, choose one of the numerous textures and gradients, as well as create a new color palette and index it. You can use a toolbox, apply a grayscale filter to the entire image and change the canvas size, aside from viewing a histogram and EXIF information.

PaintStar contains a lot of built-in image filters; they center around the color, blur, sharpen, morphology, edge detect, distort, artistic, render, glass and light effect. There's also the possibility of creating a user-defined filter. In addition to all these features, the graphic editor allows you to take screenshots and to specify the maximum level of the undo function.

The program uses a moderate amount of system resources and contains user documentation. It didn't freeze, crash or pop up error dialogs during our evaluation. Unfortunately, PaintStar doesn't support keyboard shortcuts, and the interface requires some visual improvements; no updates have been made recently.