14 DAY TRIAL // During the development of a program, a lot of graphics should be drawn as well - icons, buttons, glyphs and splash screens. If you want, you can use even Ms Paint to accomplish this task, but the results may not be up to the expectations, no matter how skilled the graphics designer is. After all, each program has its own limitations, and since there are a lot of better solutions in the wild...
...and today the time has come to check a program called Pixel Editor. Its latest version is 2.0 and you can have it as a 30 days trial. The full program costs 19.95$ and comes with a 30 days money back guarantee. The trial version comes with a nag screen that pops up from time to time and the image area is partially covered by a watermark that won't appear in your saved file, but it's annoying enough to make you wish its disappearance.
The program I am talking about here is really small, with a setup package that weighs no more than 1.1MB. As one would expect, installing Pixel Editor is something really easy to do, and this leaves us with only two things to do: check the interface and features, as usual.
Despite the fact that being original today is something really hard, since almost everything has been done already, I think there's still enough room left to allow you to create an original interface for your applications, but this time, it's not the case. The reason is this program's interface, of course. No, no, I can't say that Pixel Editor looks bad, because that would be a big lie. This program looks good and is very easy to use, but I am sure that I've seen it before. Everything looks familiar - the interface layout, the toolbar buttons, even the tools, but that's not really a problem, since you have used such a program before, you'll feel like home here.
Getting to the features part, first thing I want to tell you about is the extensive file support offered by this program. I was surprised to see that Pixel Editor can open TIFF, TGA or Photoshop PSD and PDD files, in addition to the common BMP, JPEG, PNG or Windows metafiles (WMF and EMF). If you want to save your work, then you can choose one of six file types available - BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, WBMP and XPM.
This program can be used to create Vista icons easily, because it supports transparency and Alpha Channel documents, as well as custom size images (so if you want to create 1024X1024 "icons", there's nothing to stop you!).
The tools available in the tools palette include a rectangular selection tool (I am disappointed by having only this one), the color picker, paint brush, color replacement tool and eraser, color gradient fill and more that I'll leave for you to discover, because there's something even more powerful than these that I have to tell you about now: image effects!
To be honest, I expected a little more here. After all, this program can edit multiple files at once and can open PSD files, so why not have some advanced image filters too? I am not complaining, because rotate, flip and roll effects, accompanied by smooth/sharpen, brightness/contrast, colorize or hue/saturation adjustment can prove quite useful for beginners and advanced users alike.
The zoom factor available can go up to an impressive 1600%, and the perspective grid available here can help you with designing XP style icons complying with Microsoft's specifications.
Of course that if you want to create an icon based on an existing image, there's nothing easier, just import it, choose the resizing and resampling options and then you can save it easily, but that would take away the pleasure of creating something new, and I advise you to follow the creative path, because with Pixel Editor, this is more like a game.
The Good
Pixel Editor is a fast and useful graphics editor with excellent file support and a lot of features that has a good price and is very easy to use.
The Bad
There are only two things I wish at this time: the ability to work with layers and a slightly improved interface.
The Truth
Pixel Editor may not be useful for advanced graphics designers that use heavy tools such as Photoshop or Corel Draw, but beginners will find this small program a pleasant and useful companion, and the 30 days available to try it out should be enough to decide whether to buy it or not.
