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PhotoDemon Changelog

What's new in PhotoDemon 9.0

Sep 12, 2022
  • Full list of changes by category
  • Those are some of the biggest improvements coming to PhotoDemon 9.0, but they are far from the only ones. (I haven’t even gotten to new effects yet!)
  • It would take too long to discuss every new feature at this same level of detail, so here is an abbreviated list of other highlights in the 9.0 beta.
  • Effects:
  • New Effects > Light and shadow > Bump map tool.
  • New Effects > Distort > Droste tool, so you can channel your inner M.C. Escher.
  • New Effects > Render > Truchet Tiles tool.
  • New Effects > Animation menu, including new Foreground and Background effects (for automatically applying a background or foreground layer to an animated image) and an Animation speed effect (for permanently modifying playback speed).
  • New Effects > Edge > Gradient flow tool
  • Greatly improved Effects > Transform > Perspective tool, with new live preview support and precision control for corner coordinates.
  • Greatly improved and accelerated Effects > Artistic > Stained Glass and Effects > Pixelate > Crystallize tools
  • Adjustments:
  • New Adjustments > Lighting > Dehaze tool, for recovering photos marred by haze or fog.
  • Overhauled Adjustments > Curves tool, with improved performance and a new UI.
  • Completely redesigned Adjustments > Color > Photo filter tool, to better match Photoshop’s implementation.
  • Otsu’s method is now used by the Adjustments > Monochrome tool, for improved contrast when reducing an image to two colors.
  • New Adjustments > Color > Color lookup tool, with built-in support for all 3D LUT formats that ship with Photoshop (cube, look, 3dl) and high-performance tetrahedral interpolation for best-in-class quality.
  • All photo adjustments (in any combination) can now be exported to standalone 3D LUT files, enabling use of your favorite PhotoDemon adjustments in other software.
  • PhotoDemon now ships with a default set of public-domain 3D LUTs.
  • File formats:
  • Comprehensive import and export support for Corel Paintshop Pro (psp, pspimage) images, including many text and vector layer features.
  • Comprehensive import support for GIMP XCF images, including full coverage for all color modes, precisions (integer and float), and XCF versions. GZ-compressed XCF files are also supported.
  • Comprehensive import and export support for the brand-new AVIF file format, c/o the open-source libavif library. AVIF file support is incredibly complex (the stock encoder+decoder apps are 3x larger than PhotoDemon!) and they are only available for 64-bit systems, so PhotoDemon does not ship these libraries by default. If you attempt to open or save an AVIF file, PhotoDemon offers to download and configure a portable copy of libavif.
  • Comprehensive import and export support for animated WebP images, including direct export from PhotoDemon’s built-in screen recording tool (Tools > Animated screen capture).
  • Comprehensive import and export support for lossless QOI (“quite OK image”) files.
  • Comprehensive import support for SVG and SVGZ images, c/o the open-source resvg library
  • Comprehensive import support for lossless JPEG (JPEG-LS) images, c/o the open-source CharLS library
  • Comprehensive import support for Comic Book Archive (CBZ) images.
  • Comprehensive import support for Symbian (mbm, aif) images
  • All-new GIF import and export engines, including a new best-in-class GIF optimizer that works with both static and animated GIFs.
  • New neural-network color quantizer for maximum-quality results when saving to 256-color image formats, like GIF or web-optimized PNGs. (The new quantizer is also directly accessible from the Effects > Stylize > Palettize tool.)
  • Safe overwrite behavior is now the default for all file formats. (When saving over a file that already exists, PhotoDemon will save to a temporary file, validate the temporary file’s correctness after the save completes, and only then replace the old copy with the new one.)
  • Image and Layer tools:
  • All-new selection tool engine, including full support for multiple selections. All selection tools support new “Add”, “Subtract”, and “Intersect” combine modes. In addition, a new canvas selection renderer automatically highlights the merged region of composite selections. (Other new rendering UI features are available on each selection toolpanel).
  • New Edit > Content-aware fill (and corresponding Select > Heal selected area) tools can intelligently remove objects from photos. Just select the object you want to remove, then click the menu to remove it!
  • Completely redesigned Image > Resize tool, with real-time interactive previews, 12 different resampling filters, memory size estimations, a user-resizable dialog, progress bar updates, and more. The new tool was custom-built for PhotoDemon, and it has very low memory requirements, excellent performance, and zero 3rd-party dependencies. (The Layer > Resize tool also receives these improvements!)
  • New Layer > Replace tools, for quickly replacing an existing layer with data from the clipboard or any arbitrary image file.
  • Overhauled Image > Crop tool, including new support for retaining editable text layers after cropping (instead of rasterizing them).
  • The Advanced text tool provides a new “stretch to fit” option, which automatically sizes the font to fit within the text layer’s current boundaries.
  • New lock aspect ratio toggle on the Move/Size tool.
  • New Edit > Stroke and Edit > Fill tools allow you to easily trace the active selection outline (or fill its interior) with custom pens or brushes.
  • Batch processor:
  • New support for preserving folder structure when batch processing images from a complex folder tree.
  • New support for batch processing animated image formats (GIF, PNG, WebP).
  • User interface:
  • A new compact toolpanel design requires less on-screen space, while still providing one-click access to all of PhotoDemon’s advanced tool features. (This also enables PhotoDemon to successfully work all the way down to 1024x768 screen resolutions - a rare case of supporting even older hardware than previous versions!)
  • Adjustment and Effect dialogs are no longer fixed-size - you can freely resize them at run-time, and the preview area will resize accordingly.
  • Adjustment and Effect tools now have built-in Undo/Redo on each dialog.
  • Faster app startup time, particularly on Windows 10 and 11.
  • PhotoDemon can now automatically restore your previous session if a system reboot interrupts.
  • Improved localization tools, including automated matching against other open-source translations, provide a significantly improved experience for non-EN-US locales.
  • Improved clipboard support when copy/pasting to/from Google Chrome.
  • New background image compressor greatly reduces memory usage when working with multiple images at once.
  • Similarly, a new run-time resource minimizer for UI elements makes PhotoDemon - already among the lightest photo editors - even lighter on system resources.
  • PhotoDemon’s Window menu now displays a list of open images for immediate access to any open image (even if you’ve disabled the image tabstrip).
  • Expanded “convenience” buttons in the Layer Toolbox, including new Shift+Click behavior (see button tooltips).
  • An expanded hotkey selection better matches Photoshop and other popular photo editors.
  • Recent image and macro files will now appear in search results from PhotoDemon’s built-in search tool (Ctrl+F).
  • Other:
  • These are just the highlights of version 9.0. For an exhaustive list of changes, visit the project’s commit log.
  • (This release represents more than 1700 intermediary builds, so there are a lot of improvements, large and small, across nearly every aspect of the project.)

New in PhotoDemon 8.0 (Aug 22, 2020)

  • What’s new and improved:
  • In no particular order, here are some of the new features available in PhotoDemon 8.0. Where applicable, I’ve tried to link each update to its relevant commit and/or feature request page on GitHub or Patreon, or where applicable, an explanation of the feature somewhere like Wikipedia.
  • Note: this page contains animated images. These animations are supported by all major mobile and desktop browsers, but if you’re using an old browser (like Internet Explorer, which should no longer be used), you may not see the animations. Switch to a modern browser like Edge, Firefox, Safari or Chrome to see this page in its full glory!
  • First up, Clone and Pattern stamp brushes are now available. I’ve already written about these at-length, so visit that article for more details, but as a quick summary, a clone brush allows you to “paint” with a brush that’s copied from one or more other images. You can use this to remove blemishes from an image (by using an un-blemished region as the brush’s source), or you can use it to paint various patterns, as in the sample animation below. The new tools support brushes up to 1,000 pixels in size, and the usual range of brush features (including edge softness, opacity, blend mode, and more) are fully supported.
  • A new on-canvas gradient tool is also available. Gradients can be created in eight shapes with four edge-wrapping modes. The tool supports real-time previewing and editing, even on very large (20+ megapixel) images.
  • As part of the new gradient tool, a greatly expanded and updated gradient editor now ships with the program. Choose from a built-in collection of stylized gradients, or create and save your own using the interactive editor
  • PhotoDemon now ships with built-in support for Adobe Photoshop (PSD) files and their open-source equivalent, OpenRaster (ORA) files. All Photoshop color models are supported, and images with embedded color profiles are automatically color-managed. PhotoDemon can also export images to PSD and ORA format(s), with full support for layers, blend modes, and many other features, which makes it a breeze to copy your work between programs.
  • A new search tool is available in the top-right corner of the main window. Use it to quickly locate tools, adjustments, effects, or any other program feature. (And if you’re more of a keyboard person, Ctrl+F brings up the search bar automatically.)
  • Canvas rulers are now displayed automatically, with support for measurements in pixels, inches, centimeter and millimeter, points, and picas.
  • A new Measure tool has been added, with built-in support for automatic horizon straightening
  • Selection tools have seen many improvements, including long-requested support for aspect-ratio locking
  • A new Effects > Render menu is available, including new Cloud and Fiber rendering effects that make great use of the new gradient editor
  • A new state-of-the-art Surface Blur tool ships in the Effects > Blur menu. This tool is built using technology from a 2012 paper by Qingxiong Yang, and it outperforms other popular photo editors by 1000% percent or more. (As an example, applying a 100-pixel radius surface blur to a 12-megapixel iPhone photo takes just 3 seconds in PhotoDemon, and only one CPU core is used. On the same photo, Paint.NET maxes out 4 CPU cores and take more than 40 seconds to complete.)
  • A wide range of minor tools, commands, and effects have been added to further close the gap between PhotoDemon and pro tools like Photoshop. These range from silly things like a new Pixelate > Pointillize effect, to new layer workflow tools (like dedicated fit layer to canvas size and reverse layer order commands), to a new Compare Images tool that auto-calculates PSNR between photos. If you haven’t already, explore the new Image and Layer menus to see all the new goodies available for experienced Photoshop users.
  • Many program features can now be controlled via the keyboard, with widespread improvements to tab-order, UI rendering when keys are used for navigation, and keyboard interactions in general.
  • Macros can now be directly created from your action history. If you’ve just performed an awesome set of edits to an image, use the new Tools > Create macro > From history… menu to save those actions to a macro file.
  • All edit boxes now support simple math expressions
  • PhotoDemon now ships with a custom-built PNG engine. This greatly improves performance when loading and saving PNG images, copying+pasting images between applications, and using file formats that directly embed PNG data (like OpenRaster files). The new engine also produces smaller PNG files than other software by using advanced compression technology by the open-source libdeflate library.
  • That custom PNG engine I just mentioned? It was very helpful in adding animated PNG support to the project. In fact, all animations on this page were created in PhotoDemon, by PhotoDemon, using the new Tools > Animated screen capture menu. (Unlike animated GIFs, animated PNGs support 16-million colors, high-resolution timestamps, and potentially smaller file sizes.)
  • Similarly, animated GIF files are now supported! Animations can be previewed right inside the main window, using the Navigation panel in the top-right. Create your own animated images by using the new File > Export > Animated GIF and File > Export > Animated PNG menus.
  • Windows icon (ICO) files are now fully supported. Icon frames are loaded as separate layers, and when exporting ICO files, PhotoDemon can auto-generate as many icon frame formats as you request, in both legacy (uncompressed bitmap) and modern (PNG) formats. Even better, beginners can just select which Windows version they want to target, and PhotoDemon will figure out what frames to generate for you.
  • Layers can now be split out into individual images, edited at will, then reassembled back into their original image. This makes some complex editing tasks much easier.
  • The batch processor now supports drag+drop from Windows Explorer when creating a batch process list. This makes it a snap to add complex collections of files or folders.
  • More than a dozen Adjustment filters have been rewritten for improved quality across a wide range of photography styles. The Auto-Correct and Auto-Enhance tools now produce faster, subtler results, particularly on skin-tones, while standard adjustments like Exposure and Gamma received updated user interfaces to make them even faster and simpler to use.
  • Many program behaviors now support customization via prompts. For example, Drag-dropping images onto the canvas now displays a dialog for how to handle the dropped image, and you can always ask PhotoDemon to remember your preference in the future
  • Color palettes can now be applied from any palette file using the Effects > Stylize > Palettize menu. Supported palette formats include GIMP, Adobe Photoshop, Paint.NET, and PaintShop Pro/JASC. Palettes can also be generated from any image and exported to all of these formats using the new File > Export > Palette menu.
  • Dozens of effects have received large performance and feature updates. Nearly all transform, distort, and artistic filters have been rewritten for improved speed, while noise removal tools like the Median filter are now significantly faster at large radii and/or on large images. (These improvements were made possible by a number of new effect engines, including a multiresolution wavelet optimizer.)
  • PhotoDemon now provides a high-speed perfect color matcher using KD-trees. This improves performance on many adjustments and effects, and it also improves performance when saving images to certain file formats (especially palette-based formats, like GIF).
  • Saved adjustment and effect presets can now be edited, deleted, or rearranged to your liking.
  • Using the program in languages other than English no longer incurs minor UI performance penalties, thanks to a new custom-built Boyer-Moore text matching engine.
  • The color selector panel of the main window now provides a list of recently used colors at the bottom of the panel
  • and the color selector can also be switched to a new “use palette from file” mode, including auto-matching colors to their nearest palette equivalent when using the color selector tool
  • Speaking of the right-side toolbar, all panels can now be resized to your liking
  • Want to quickly strip all metadata from an image? Just use the new Image > Metadata > Remove all metadata tool.
  • As part of PhotoDemon’s long-running commitment to user privacy, photodemon.org has been migrated to a secure (https) server. All PhotoDemon update checks and downloads are now served exclusively over secured connections.
  • Tools that use random numbers now support a new UI for entering random seed values (inspired by Minecraft, of all things). This allows you to recreate “random” effects identically across multiple images.
  • Various improvements have been made to running PhotoDemon on OSX and Linux via Wine, including fixing a number of Wine-specific UI problems.
  • As part of a new initiative to make PhotoDemon as stable as possible, debug logging now auto-activates whenever a program crash is detected. You can always send those debug logs directly to me to help solve any problems you encounter.

New in PhotoDemon 7.0.1 (Jan 15, 2018)

  • PhotoDemon 7.0.1 contains a number of minor bug-fix and stability improvements relative to PhotoDemon 7.0. It is recommended for all users.
  • There is only one feature change in this build. I have modified PhotoDemon’s auto-update engine to require secure http connections (https://). For the vast majority of users, this doesn’t change anything; it simply makes the automatic update process more secure.
  • For users on very old, unpatched versions of Windows XP or Windows Vista, however, there is a small risk that PhotoDemon’s automatic updates will no longer work, because these operating systems lack the necessary features to securely connect to PhotoDemon’s new update server. Note that PhotoDemon itself will still function normally, but you will be responsible for downloading any future updates.
  • I never like to disable program features, but this is a rare “necessary evil” to protect the largest possible number of users. Note that up-to-date XP and Vista installs work just fine with PhotoDemon’s new update engine – it is only original installs (with no subsequent patching) that may be affected.

New in PhotoDemon 7.0 (Nov 29, 2017)

  • All-new user interface, including theme support
  • Advanced text tools
  • On-canvas paint tools
  • New adjustments and effects
  • Full Unicode support
  • Core engine improvements
  • Other miscellaneous improvements

New in PhotoDemon 6.6 (Mar 24, 2015)

  • New selection tools: magic wand, lasso, and polygon.
  • Automatic updates, including delta patches for smaller files (like languages). Customize the new update options from the Tools > Options menu.
  • Numerous interface improvements, including new tab strip, text up/down, image buttons, and other controls created specifically for PhotoDemon.
  • Improved file format support, including RAW support for 200 new camera models (via LibRaw), WMF and EMF metafile support, improved PNG compatibility, and many metadata improvements.
  • New tone-mapping dialog for HDR and RAW images. Tone-mapping is also provided for high bit-depth variants of common formats, like 48- and 64-bit PNGs.
  • Adaptive supersampling is now available for all Distort and Transformation tools.
  • A number of New and/or overhauled tools, including Cross-Screen, Lens Flare, single-shot HDR, Channel Mixer, Surface Blur, Unsharp Masking, and more.
  • Many improvements to existing tools, including performance, accuracy, and interface improvements to Curves, Levels, Green Screen (Chroma Key), Color Balance, Kaleidoscope, Zoom Blur, Motion Blur, and many others.
  • Improved performance program-wide, including a new viewport pipeline, improved image compositor, updated localization engine, and new internal image manager.
  • Improved localization and translation support. This is the first PD release to ship without any incomplete language files – thank you again to the amazing volunteer translators that made this possible!
  • Many improvements to the main editor screen, including a resizable and customizable left-hand toolbox, auto-hiding of the options toolbox, and new quick-access buttons for Save Lossless Copy and Fade Last Effect.
  • New Fit Image, Fit Width, and Fit Height “smart zoom” options.
  • Many other bug-fixes, performance, and accuracy improvements throughout the program

New in PhotoDemon 6.4 Build 249 Beta (May 8, 2014)

  • Support for an unlimited number of Layers
  • Copy, Copy Merged, Paste as New Image, and Paste as New Layer are now available in the Edit menu
  • Layers can be reordered using the large arrow buttons on the Layer toolbox
  • Layers can be hidden or shown with a single click
  • Layers can be merged up, merged down, and duplicated using the hover buttons on the layer panel
  • Variable opacity and six layer blend modes are currently available. (In the screenshot above, the Tardis wallpaper is demonstrating the “Soft Light” blend mode.)
  • Layered images can be resized, rotated, flipped and mirrored without flattening the image. Many programs don’t allow layered images to be arbitrarily rotated without first flattening the image, but PhotoDemon can do this without trouble!
  • A new Layers menu provides all the same options as the Layers toolbox, plus additional options like Flatten Image, Merge Visible Layers, and adding/removing individual layer’s transparency.
  • Layers can be moved around the image canvas in real-time using the new “Move” tool.
  • Layered images can be saved to PhotoDemon’s new layer-friendly file format (.PDI).
  • All items in the Selections, Adjustments, and Effects menus are in working order. Adjustments and Effects always apply to the currently active layer, allowing you to edit each layer individually.

New in PhotoDemon 6.2.1 (May 8, 2014)

  • FIXED: Severe error in the Image -> Canvas Size dialog
  • FIXED: Various problems in locales where “,” is used as a decimal separator
  • FIXED: Some controls do not display correctly on Windows XP

New in PhotoDemon 6.2 (May 8, 2014)

  • Brand-new interface, including image tabs, dockable toolbars, and a greatly improved status bar
  • Completely color-managed workflows, including comprehensive support for embedded profiles in all relevant image formats (JPEG, PNG, TIFF, etc), and per-monitor profile support via the Tools -> Options menu.
  • New hardware-accelerated viewport engine
  • Spanish and Portuguese translations. These are primarily machine-based at present, so if you can help improve them, please contact me.
  • New color selector, with support for RGB/HSV, CSS/HTML hex, and grabbing colors from the screen
  • Comprehensive resize options, including support for percent-based resize, print units (inches and cm), and embedded DPI
  • All-new JPEG dialog, with live quality previews, automatic quality handling, custom presets, and per-image metadata options
  • Live previews for all potentially lossy export dialogs, including JPEG, JPEG-2000, JPEG-XR, and WebP
  • WebP and JPEG-XR support (import and export)
  • Autosaves are now provided
  • New Hand tool for quickly scrolling large images
  • New Content-Aware Resize tool
  • Improved tool previews, including support for previewing either the full image, or the image at 100% zoom plus scrolling
  • Asynchronous metadata handling for much faster image loading and saving
  • Improved Screen Capture tool, including per-window capture
  • The “Black and White” tool has been redesigned so that any black/white conversion supports reduction to any number of gray shades. A full-featured dithering engine has also been added, with support for ten different dithering algorithms.
  • New “Replace Color” tool makes it easy to change the color of clothing, hair, or any other item in a photo.
  • New “Chroma Blur” tool is helpful for noise removal; only color data is blurred, but luminance is left unchanged.
  • A new File -> Revert option makes it easy to quickly restore the on-disk version of an image.
  • All scroll controls in the program have been redesigned against a new scroll bar class. This should improve a number of old bugs where the mouse would get “stuck” on a scroll bar control. Improved precision also means tools can offer more detailed settings.
  • Many minor improvements to metadata handling. Things like color space and software are correctly marked in exported files, and changes to metadata importing have made it much faster, while still providing the most comprehensive listing possible.
  • Lots of improvements for XP users, including live selection feathering, Recent File icons, and overall stability improvements.
  • Rewritten Recent File handler. You can now keep as many files as you want in the Recent Files menu, and a “Load all recent files” option makes it easy to restore an entire group of photos for editing.
  • Selected areas can now be exported as their own image using the Select -> Export menu.
  • Windows 7 and 8 users can now use the integrated Windows Print dialog for much better printing support and features.
  • When applying actions to a selection, the preview window will now show the selection as it appears on the image. This is better than the old system of just showing the selected area, as you can now see what impact the edits will have on the final image.
  • The Preferences -> Advanced panel now displays a report of what functions are hardware accelerated on your system. This should be fairly standard across systems and OSes, but for curious power users, the data may be interesting.
  • Windows 7 and 8 users now benefit from taskbar progress reports while edits are processing.
  • Update checks are now asynchronous, meaning they happen in the background without slowing down the main program.
  • When reducing a semi-transparent image to 8bpp (e.g. GIFs), you can now choose any background color for compositing semi-transparent pixels.
  • As always, there are many more miscellaneous bug-fixes, performance improvements, and tool enhancements.