Pictor

If you're scouring the web for an alternate image editor that's both easy to use and filled with advanced options, you can take a look at Pictor. Wrapped in a portable package, this graphic editing application has intuitive options when it comes to color adjustments, cropping, resizing, and others.

The first thing that came to our mind when reaching the main app window is IrfanView. Whether or not this was on purpose, the interface of Pictor is quite similar to IrfanView: simple layout with advanced features hidden behind menus.

Pictor is capable of opening graphic files with extensions such as PNG, JPEG, TIFF and BMP. However, filetype support is not that extensive (for example, Photoshop PSD or RAW images from digital cameras are not supported). This list gets shorter when it comes to saving photos, since this can only be done in PNG, JPEG, EJPEG (encrypted JPEG), BMP and TIFF format.

Entire menus are dedicated to image rotating, cropping, resizing and erasing mode (by pencil, shape or color). You can even draw a quadrangle to replace the filling with another picture.

As far as color tweaks are concerned, you can view the histogram (red, green, blue and gray channels), control the gamma, saturation, brightness and contrast level, sharpen the picture, as well as apply black and white, negative, dithering, gray, warm or cold color filters. In fact, the color channels can be accurately selected by adjusting the red, green and blue levels.

Worth noting is that effects can be previewed in real time. Options are also available for drawing with mosaic, focus, blur, color and brightness pens, whose settings can be configured (e.g. pen radius). 32-bit RGBA can be converted to 25-bit RGB.

What's more, you can add text or frames, insert images (such as watermarks), set external pictures as the backgrounds. Similar to using pens, you can freely draw on the picture with the mouse cursor. Unfortunately, we didn't find the undo function satisfactory. For example, it didn't work when attempting to undo a filter in our tests.

Lastly, if you want to view all pictures from the current directory, it's possible to set the file order (e.g. by file name or format, in ascending or descending order) and to ask Pictor to automatically rotate JPEG or TIFF images using their EXIF data (wherever applicable). Slideshow options are not implemented.

Taking into account that we've noticed some functionality issues, we feel that Pictor still needs a lot of work. However, this is understandable given the fact that it was recently released. We're looking forward to new features and improvements.