soft-image2

Easy to use, full of icons it is pleasant to use at first run. Although it looks like MS-Photo Editor it is more powerful than its concurrent. Its interface is accessible to all even to beginners without much brainstorming.

Plus sides, PSP on-line help is very convenient and answer to all your waits. More easily than probably some other products, it can alter images, both in size and colors, create special effects, adjust hue of a specific layer or extract the outline of an object (magic wand) to create masks, etc. You can also place a text on a path and bending it to any custom shape. It contains all paint tools you need, use vector drawing tools, a color gradient editor and a capture module.

You can also add watermarking for embedding and reading copyright in your images. PSP manages thumbnails too in various sizes, an easy way to browse your subdirectories in place of using the standard explorer searching for a specific image.

PSP comes with a second application call Animation Shop2 able to use AVI and Autodesk animations formats. At last through its Twain interface, it provides direct support for many of the most popular digital cameras.

Now at version 6, PSP can export in transparent GIF and JPEG and supports PostScript and Adobe Photoshop PSD formats.

Photo-Paint

In many aspects this program included in the Corel Ventura 8 package is very similar to PaintShop Pro 6. Nearly the same icons layouts and the same menus. I prefer however this program because Ventura comes with two CD-ROM of cliparts, images, fonts, floating objects, etc. and several manuals over 600 pages each really complete and helpful.

This program is pleasant to use and really powerful. It looks as if it was designed with the end-users requests in mind. For example, the menu toolbar is user definable and many tools can be extracted from the toolbar and moved on your desktop if necessary. In case of problem you can always take a look at the on-line tutor, not complete but useful for inexperienced users.

As many modern products it can directly acquire images from scanner or digital camera. It uses all standard image alterations tools and give you also the opportunity to manipulate 3D models. Masks and transparencies haven't be forgot. You can create them, add them to your original and enhance this way your images in a few mouse clic.

A Scrapbook is also available to drag-and-drop objects from your CD or any FTP site, to find files and folders. All images can be displayed as thumbnails.

Among its unusual qualities it can create movies and save them in AVI or GIF format. That means that it can also read animations GIF and alter its individuals frames as any other picture. Among its special tools you can select a part of an image and transform it as you want or use the predefined special effects. All tools you are using open a small floating windows in which you can optionally see a preview of your alteration. You can also use a scripting module to automatically create text or background with special appearance. Color and printing are spectacular as it is able to manage up to 48-bit RGB images, to convert to NTSC or Adobe Postscript3. It can load or save in over 70 files format.

At last Corel gives you access to his on-line newsgroup to get a free flow of information and a technical support mainly driven by Corel volunteers.

Now at version 8, Photo-Paint runs on all Windows platforms.

Microsoft corp, $200

Photo Editor

Probably the most popular imaging tool from Microsoft as it comes with the Office97 Professional package as a graphical option but it not installed by default. Advantage, it is easy to use thanks to its predefined functions with standard thresholds.

This product is rather simple and addressed to all the family. It gathers standard image and colors alterations functions like crop, sharpen, soften, negative, despeckle, posterize plus the always and very useful dynamic balance (brightness, contrast and gamma with independent RGB channels) and a few geometric functions (affine transformation and rotations).

To satisfy young artists, some "painting" effects are added like notepaper, watercolor, stained glass, etc. In case of errors using copy and paste function par example the Undo/Redo is always welcome or simply to see the effect of your alteration.

Because it is light, fast and intuitive, I sometimes use it to soften my artworks or to modify the geometry or the balance of my electronic images.

Hiatus, most filters have very limited thresholds, there is no arithmetic function, no possibility to register images, no way to merge images or create composites, doing astrometric calibration, no plotting data or way to measure images or creating filters. At last when using memory hungry processes as special effects on 1024x768 pixel images, the process sometimes stops working at mid-way or is unable to display the preview, displaying a "not enough memory" warning even on a 198 MB system !

PhotoEditor read and save in various formats including BMP, GIF, JPEG, TIFF or Kodak Photo CD. Now at version 3, it is included in Office97 Professional Pack

Steven S.Tuma & Dean Williams,

Deep Sky 2000 Image processing

Inside the well-known planetarium software featured in another page of this web, there is this IP module that presents some original features. Aside of standards imaging functions like colors and image alteration (hue, brightness, size, etc), it includes a shearing option able to stretch images.

Plus sides, it uses a TWAIN source to acquire images and is able to create animations.

At last it saves in a great variety of formats even exotic ones, from 1 to 32-bits including the Leadtools CMP format which compresses even more than the JPEG algorithm.

Not fully tested yet.

1995-2001

The University of Texas Health Science Center, Freeware

Image Tool

This a complex imaging software able to process 24-bit images. As many others it uses a TWAIN peripheral to acquire images. Its functions are quite similar to MS-Photo Editor but here stops the comparison.

Written for medical imaging in mind, IT2 is analysis oriented. It takes a deep usage of special functions like data analysis, tools like elliptical AOI, a spatial and density calibration mode, etc.

IT2 includes all standard tools. It is able to alter image geometry but rotates images by steps of 90° only, it can adjust balance, smooth, contrast and sharpness, use masks, functions like gradient, mean, stack and merge images, substract quantitiative or qualitative one image from another,... and includes a small pixel editor among other functions.

At last its power comes from its built-in scripting module and it may use plug-ins through dll's loading.

Being given this is an alpha version there are still some bugs well documented that the UTHSCSA team is currently fixing. Now at version 2c, Image Tool runs on Windows 98, NT 4.0 and Windows 2000.

IMAGE-32/PRO

There is something common with MIRA in this software. Written some years ago in C and assembly languages, this 32-bit program is the fastest I know, comparable to SUN or VAX workstations and able to display very large images over 2 K-pixels by side, depending your available memory. More expensive than MIRA this is in my humble opinion its only competitor.

Here are some of its features : X and Y real-time plots, interactive histogram, box sum for photometry, interactive 8-bit false color, tricolor merging, linear and logarithmic displays, histogram equalization and more.

In addition it supports numerous mathematical functions including image arithmetic and functions, high and low pass filters, edge detection, FFT, convolutions with various masks, detector flat fielding and you can also create your own filter kernels.

Aside the standard mathematical functions and filters it offers some photometry routines like a point source function (PSF) to find stars in images, background subtracted aperture photometry given relative magnitude and error estimates.

In fact thanks to its fast manipulation of large data this program is suited for variable star studies, astrometry, supernova searches, optical transient, etc.

It supports 32-bit images as well as 4 bytes per pixel real images and is able to remap 96-bit colors space to 256 colors. It imports numbers of CCD file formats, NASA IMQ, IMG or IBG format, FITS, GIF, ASCII and binary files. At last it can drive a Meade LX200 and SSC series telescope and control various CCD cameras.

Already at the time of its first publishing, the manufacturer suggested to use a 80386 with math coprocessor or higher CPU, 8 MB RAM and an SVGA 1024x768 display. A 24-bit display adapter is highly recommended.

Axilone Multimedia, 195€

PRiSM

Written by Gregory Giuliani, PRiSM is a complete software, including in this new release a planetarium, an image processing tool and a telescope driver, all this for a low budget. It was selected by several professional observatories worldwide from Pic-du-Midi to MMT and ESO. But check the software part of this review for an overview of the planetarium module.

The image processing module of PRiSM allows you to preprocess (background and bias compensation, normalization, dark frame, flat field image, etc) or postprocess your digital or CCD pictures. It includes all useful functions as filtering and trichromy with sub-pixel alignment, without to forget the standard arithmetical and geometrical operations (addition, substraction, enlargment, mosaic, planisphere, etc). PRiSM also includes photometric and astrometric tools (data reduction and more), on par with MIRA Pro.

In parallel, PRiSM can drive some CCD cameras (Audine, FIERA, Hisis, KAF0400, SBIG, MX5, etc) and telescopes interfaces (LX200, Celestron Ultima, Sky Commander, NGC Max, Micro-Guider, Eureka, Ouranos and is compliant with Very Large Telescope TCS) including PEC support, MCMT encoders and electrical focusers. FIERA and SBIG are the only CCD's that can be driven under Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 as their respective company wrote a specific drive for this last OS.

Now at version 6, PRiSM runs on all Windows platforms.

PRISM

This is a French product developed by professional astronomers and image processing specialists. Using a professional-like GUI this is a program similar to MIRA but simpler and voluntary dedicated to amateurs. It includes more than 180 functions, among which standard arithmetical and geometrical functions, filters like unsharp mask, Gauss, low and high-pass, gradient, user-defined convolution and more. It is completed with wavelets analysis, image restoration by deconvolution, FFT, rotational gradient to enhance radial structures like comets, black optimization, flat-field frame generator (median filter), polynomial gradient correction and an expert programmation mode.

The image analysis module is quite complete providing photometric measurements and astrometric analysis (by centroiding calculation and stellar modeling) to extract stars from the continuous background with error estimates and a blink mode to search new objects.

The visualization mode accepts bilinear zooms and B-spline, isophotes, 3D views, trichromy, drawing functions and animations.

Created in the early 90's, this program runs on 80386 and higher processor with 2 MB RAM and SVGA monitor but negative point it only displays a maximum of 256 colors (an 8-bit display adapter is enough). So distracting artifacts can show up in areas of subtle colors variation such as clear skies. Good to know, dozen of raw images are provided with the program.

Registered

MS-Paint

Supplied with the Microsoft Windows OS, this is a very simple product that a 4 years old kid can use to draw colored circles, box and write text in various sizes and fonts and zoom in. Its rotation tool beeing limited to flip in both directions and rotate at 90, 180 or 270°, I mainly use it for its ease to use, for its capabilitiy to fill in an area with the exact tint, for its free selection able to extract any custom part of the image and to copy it elsewhere, its possibility of superimpose several images, to mirror or reverse it, as many features that are not so easily or quickly accessible in more powerful tools like Picture Window Pro or Photoshop. MS-Paint can also be useful to create small plain color bitmaps for illustrating purposes. MS-Paint saves only in monochrome, 16 or 256 colors bitmap and 24-bit color. The product is included in most Windows OS from 95 to XP.

ULead Systems, Inc.

Photo Styler

Known for his GIF Animator and other Web tools, ULead published in early '90 this Windows 3.1 product that satisfied me before I bought some more powerful tools. It can really be used by newbies. If you know something about gamma and mask technique, this product is yours. It is able to alter easily images both in colors and sizes and comes with a complete pixel editor. It also includes several distortion functions, 2D and 3D-spatial effects. Only counterpoint, it only supporting TIFF, PCX, GIF, EPS and some old formats in 256 colors.

I mention it if you are looking for a software running on 8-bit OS but it runs also fine on 32-bits OS as Windows NT in a separate memory space. Only problem it cannot read all TIFF images but only the non-compressed and LZW formats.This old application uses also the short file name format when displaying long filenames (6~n.3).

Anti-blooming filter software

This anti-blooming routine of a few dozen KB runs under Windows. This simple but powerful routine is able to suppress strikes on digital pictures taken with a CCD camera not equipped with an anti-blooming filter. It is dedicated to Apogee, Meade and SBIG CCD and read 16-bit FIT images.It can be used standalone or as a plug-on to MaxIM/DL.

Available from Starizona under the name "ABF21-CD". Really, a must.

By the way, Kazuyuki Tanaka is an expert in optics and has collabored to this website in illustrating several reports (about turbulence, in the image gallery, etc).

Take a look at my Digital Darkroom menu for more detail about image processing

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