PhotoDemon - the number one photo editor (VB6)

This open source project is one of the most advanced photo editors in the world. Obviously it is made in Visual Basic 6.0! When I see a project like this I have to keep a moment of silence in sign of respect. The source code represents with no exaggeration, perfection.

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Photo Demon

Lightweight and completely portable

No installer is provided or required. Aside from a temporary folder – which you can specify in the Tools > Options menu – PhotoDemon leaves no trace on your hard drive. Many users run PhotoDemon from a USB stick or microSD card.

Integrated macro recording and batch processing

Complex editing actions can be recorded as macros (similar to Office software). A built-in batch processor lets you apply macros to entire folders of images.

Usability is paramount

Many open-source photo editors are usability nightmares. PhotoDemon tries not to be. Small touches like real-time effect previews, save/load presets on all tools, unlimited Undo/Redo, "Fade last action", keyboard accelerators, mouse wheel and X-button support, and descriptive icons make it fast and easy to use.

Pro-grade features and tools

• Extensive file format support, including Adobe Photoshop (PSD), Corel PaintShop Pro (PSP), and all major camera RAW formats
• Color-managed workflow, including full support for embedded ICC profiles
• Advanced multi-layer support, including editable text layers and non-destructive layer modifications
• On-canvas tools: digital paintbrushes, clone and pattern brushes, interactive gradients, and more
• Adjustment tools: levels, curves, HDR, shadow/highlight recovery, white balance, and many more
• Filters and effects: perspective correction, edge detection, noise removal, content-aware blur, unsharp masking, green screen, lens diffraction, vignetting, and many more
• More than 200 tools are provided in the current build.

Limitation

• PhotoDemon isn't designed for operating systems other than Microsoft Windows. A compatibility layer like Wine may allow it to work on macOS, Linux, or BSD systems, but these configurations are not officially supported.
• Due to its portable nature, PhotoDemon is only available as a 32-bit application. (This means it cannot load or save images larger than ~2 GB in size.)

File formats

• Comprehensive import and export support for Corel Paintshop Pro (psp, pspimage) images, including many text and vector layer features.
• Comprehensive import and export support for the brand-new AVIF file format, c/o the open-source libavif library. AVIF file support is incredibly complex (the stock encoder+decoder apps are almost 3x larger than PhotoDemon!) and they are only available for 64-bit systems, so PhotoDemon does not ship these libraries by default. If you attempt to open or save an AVIF file, PhotoDemon will offer to download a local copy of libavif for you.
• Comprehensive import and export support for animated WebP images, including direct export to animated WebP from PhotoDemon's built-in screen recorder tool (Tools > Animated screen capture)
• Comprehensive import and export support for lossless QOI ("quite OK image") files.
• Comprehensive import support for SVG and SVGZ images, c/o the open-source resvg library
• Comprehensive import support for lossless JPEG (JPEG-LS) images, c/o the open-source CharLS library
• Comprehensive import support for Comic Book Archive (CBZ) images.
• Comprehensive import support for Symbian (mbm, aif) images
• All-new GIF import and export engines, including a new best-in-class GIF optimizer.
• New neural-network color quantizer for maximum-quality results when saving to 256-color image formats, like GIF or web-optimized PNGs. (The new quantizer is also directly accessible from the Effects > Stylize > Palettize tool.)

Effects

• New support for Photoshop effect plugins ("8bf", 32-bit only), with thanks to spetric's Photoshop-Plugin-Host library.

• New Effects > Distort > Droste tool, so you can channel your inner M.C. Escher
• New Effects > Render > Truchet Tiles tool
• New Effects > Animation menu, including new Foreground and Background effects (for automatically applying a background or foreground to an animated image)
• New Effects > Edge > Gradient flow tool
• Greatly improved and accelerated Effects > Artistic > Stained Glass and Effects > Pixelate > Crystallize tools

Adjustments

• New Adjustments > Color > Color lookup tool, with built-in support for all 3D LUT formats that ship with Photoshop (cube, look, 3dl) and high-performance tetrahedral interpolation for best-in-class quality
• New Adjustments > Lighting > Dehaze tool
• Overhauled Adjustments > Curves tool, with improved performance and a new UI
• Completely redesigned Adjustments > Color > Photo filter tool, to better match the identical tool in Photoshop
• Otsu's method is now used by the Adjustments > Monochrome tool, for improved contrast when reducing an image to two colors.

Image and Layer tools

• All-new selection tool engine, including full support for merging selections. All selection tools support new "Add", "Subtract", and "Intersect" combine modes. In addition, a new canvas selection renderer automatically highlights the selected region of composite selections. (Other new rendering UI features are available on each selection toolpanel).
• Completely redesigned Image > Resize tool, with real-time interactive previews, 12 different resampling filters, memory size estimations, a user-resizable dialog, progress bar updates, and more. The new tool was custom-built for PhotoDemon, and it has very low memory requirements, excellent performance, and zero 3rd-party dependencies. (The Layer > Resize tool also receives all of these new features!)
• New Layer > Replace tools, for quickly replacing an existing layer with data from the clipboard or any arbitrary image file.
• Overhauled Image > Crop tool, including new support for retaining editable text layers after cropping (instead of rasterizing them).
• New lock aspect ratio toggle on the Move/Size tool

Batch processor

• New support for preserving folder structure when batch processing images from a complex folder tree
• New support for batch processing animated image formats (GIF, PNG, WebP)

User interface

• A new toolpanel design takes up less space than ever before, while still providing one-click access to all of PhotoDemon's advanced on-canvas tool features. (This also enables PhotoDemon to successfully work all the way down to 1024x768 screen resolutions - a rare case of supporting even older hardware than previous versions of the app!)
• Adjustment and Effect dialogs are no longer fixed-size - you can resize every last one of them at run-time!
• Adjustment and Effect tools now have built-in Undo/Redo on each dialog
• Faster app startup time, particularly on Windows 10
• PhotoDemon can now automatically restore your previous session if a system reboot interrupts your work.
• Improved clipboard support when copy/pasting to/from Google Chrome
• New background image compressor greatly reduces memory usage when working with multiple images at once
• Similarly, a new run-time resource minimizer specifically designed for UI elements makes PhotoDemon - already among the lightest photo editors - even lighter on system resources.
• PhotoDemon's Window menu now displays a list of open images for immediate access to any open image (even if you've disabled the image tabstrip).
• Expanded "convenience" buttons in the Layer Toolbox, including new Shift+Click behavior (see button tooltips)
• Additional hotkeys have been implemented to better match other photo editing software
• Recent image and macro files will now appear in search results from PhotoDemon's built-in search tool (Ctrl+F)

Other

For a full list of changes, check the project's commit log.