I must confess that the only graphics editor that I consider worthy of my spare time is Adobe Photoshop, although I found a lot of interesting smaller programs built to help you with image editing tasks. Photoshop is an endless source of inspiration for writers, tutorial makers, and things achieved by professionals that use it prove that this program is limited by only one factor: the imagination and creative skills of its user.

As it happens in real life, having only one religion and one god is not good at all for business, so a lot of smaller image editing tools are available as entry level tools, some of them being quite interesting and powerful. Now, let's see what I have here today...

EximiousSoft Cool Image has reached version 2.32 and what I have here is a shareware version, while to register the program, you have to pay 29.95$. The installation package has 2.1MB in size and setting up the program was a child's play, so let's move to the interesting parts: interface and features, as usual.

Cool Image has a well organized interface that doesn't get out of the pattern established by most average graphics editors that I have seen in the last months. Inside the main program's window you can find a menu bar, two toolbars (the main toolbar and a second one that contains the drawing tools) and two panels - the Options Panel and the Objects Panel. These being said, let's see what can be done with this program, shall we?

First of all, the good part is that Cool Image supports layers, but they are not called layers here. Anyway, if you are used to Photoshop's layers (I take Photoshop as a reference, but there are a lot of other programs that allow you to use layers), you'll find the objects available here and their properties pretty close to them.

The drawing capabilities are quite limited, because you can only create polygons, ellipses and rectangles, but there is no freehand brush here, just to mention one of the things that I miss.

The list of file types supported by the program includes GIF, BMP, JPG, PSD, PNG, ANI, ICO, CUR and others, so here it goes- another white ball in the pot!

The photo processing features are very limited, but I was surprised to find a lot of anti aliasing methods available when resizing the current picture. Other good things are that you can open more images at the same time or use this program to perform full screen or custom area capture.

If there's something more to this program, I am sure you'll have the time to find it. For me, the time has come to draw the conclusions.

The Good

EximiousSoft Cool Image supports layers, has a good built- in documentation, is easy to use and supports working with enough file types, including PSD.

The Bad

This program is unbalanced, because it offers some interesting and useful features but also lacks some basic ones, and if I should have the money for it, I would keep using The Gimp and buy a really useful commercial program.

The Truth

Although the name and first sight gave me hopes, Cool Image isn't that cool, at least not for me. Don't get me wrong, I have seen much worse, but I am not impressed at all with this, so my label for this is "uncool". Anyway, if you have the time, download it and give it a try, it may be an interesting experience!

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: