Creative

Creative is a free and open-source graphic editing tool that comes packed with several color adjustment options for those looking to enhance their pictures by tracing bitmaps or vectorizing pictures.

To be more specific, it generates smooth and scalable drawings from "jagged" pixel images. It's especially practical for printing large-formatted pics for paper, posters and T-shirts. It includes approachable settings that can be tackled with ease by all types of users, even those less experienced with such software.

The application represents a graphical interface for potrace, a small-sized utility created to trace images, such as PBM, PGM, PPM and BMP files. It's developed in Delphi 7 and requires Adobe SVG Viewer 2.0 to display graphics.

The interface of Creative is represented by a standard window with a simple design and neatly organized structure, where you can open and fill images with color, as well as tweak the brightness, line thickness, dot removal, corner and curve smoothness, along with the detail level. Plus, you can invert colors.

Worth noting is that modifications can be viewed in real time, so there's no need to apply changes just to be able to view the effects and undo the action if you're not pleased with the results. The final photo can be saved to PDF, EPS, SVG or standard image formats, such as JPG, GIF and PNG.

It didn't put a strain on the computer's performance in our tests, thanks to the fact that it needed a low amount of CPU and RAM to work properly. No error dialogs popped up and it didn't hang or crash. Although it hasn't received updates for a long time, we haven't experienced compatibility issues with later Windows models.

Taking everything into account, Creative turns out to be a handy program for tracing bitmaps and vectoring images, and it can be easily handled.