cstitch

Images are used to represent portraits, landscapes or enhance different environments. Before actually using an image, you might first want to process it, with an abundance of applications at your disposal. Cstitch comes as a different image processor that lets you create a symbol pattern out of images and export the result to PDF.

A neat advantage of the application is that you don't need to install it on your system for it to properly run. This means you can keep it on a removable storage device and use on the go along with files you want to process, while system registries remain intact.

The application is pretty clean and intuitive in terms of design and quickly gets you up and running. There are four steps you go through until obtaining the result, each prompting you with a description and hints so you don't get stuck along the way. You can visit previous steps at any given moment in case any more tweaks need to be done.

Since each image is made out of an abundance of colors you only get to work with one file at a time. The first step leaves you to decide upon the variety of colors to use in order to generate the new image, with several presets or the possibility to manually choose.

Association based on your selection of colors is nicely done, with the result being displayed in the second step. Both the original and generated picture are displayed side-by-side for careful comparison. A few options are at your disposal to fit the image to screen, as well as the possibility to pick what images to be displayed in each panel.

The application generates a square pattern representation of the original image you can use as a model for stitching. Depending on the square size you get to set in one of the steps, as well as the colors chosen to process, the result is more or less similar to the original.

You can export an image file of your work anytime, with some of the most popular image formats supported. You can generate a PDF file to which you can add info like title and description. Sadly, the image quality from the PDF file is rather poor, with little to no options in regard.

In conclusion, cstitch manages to live up to expectations, with an intuitive design and wizard-driven creation process that quickly gets you up and running. You can take your time and manually define colors and symbols used to generate the pattern, save images at any given time during the creation process and use on the go thanks to portability, making it worth a try.