APE ( formerly DHO Photo-Workshop)

Before uploading all your creations on social networks, you probably take the time to make some adjustments, crop, enhance colors, or apply different effects. In this regard, applications like APE want to make the process easy, intuitive, and flexible, with a large collection of drawing tools and effects.

On the one hand, the application relies on .NET Framework in order to function, so you need to make sure it is installed on the target PC. With no setup required, you can easily deploy it on a thumb drive to carry around along with your collection. Moreover, registry entries are not modified in the process, so neither is the stability of the computer you use it on.

An initial step is to create a new drawing from scratch, but it’s also possible to load an existing picture, with supported formats like BMP, DIB, RLE, JPG, PNG, GIF, EMF, WMF, TIF, TGA, PSD, or EXE. Export options are almost the same, so the application can also be used for simple conversion.

Drawing tools can be found on the side, as well as some other tools which can be used to mark areas, cut, measure, draw with a pen, paintbrush, fill bucket, line, rectangle, gradient rectangle, circle, or adding text. There’s a color palette so you can easily pick a specific tone. You can work with multiple layers, but this can be rather difficult, especially since there are no merging options.

The application also comes with a wide range of effects, and filters. Basic color management helps adjust RGB sliders, with more advanced options to sharpen, blur, brighten, skew, emboss, edge-detect, and a couple of special effects like pixelate, and time warp.

Unfortunately, it can be a bit of a hassle to perfectly get to know the application. For instance, restoring after you apply an effect reverts the picture to its original form, while undo operations don’t really help in this regard.

In conclusion, APE comes with good intentions, and truth be told, is equipped with quite the variety of drawing tools, and effects. However, using it on the long run easily becomes frustrating because of some faulty functions, and making mistakes is not really an acceptable step in editing here.