PhotoDemon 9.0 is the latest major version of the image editor and comes after two years of development. Free and open sourcehas more than enough features for the user on foot.
When we talk about free alternatives to Photoshop and other professional applications, GIMP stands out above the rest, but like Adobe development it is ‘heavy’ due to the huge number of features it includes and has a steep learning curve if you want to take advantage of it to some otherwise outstanding applications.
PhotoDemon 9.0, lighter and with a new interface
There are other editing tools that without so many features offer more than the basics and are easier to use. The one at hand falls into this group and has been released with notable improvements to the user interface, support for new image formats, reduced resource usage, built-in support for Adobe Photoshop plugins, and more.
One of the main improvements is that uses fewer resources than the previous version. On cold boot, for example, it uses 12% less memory than the previous version. And it is that the high consumption of resources is usually the norm in this group of editing applications.
The user interface has been redesigned for the occasion. Work with different screen resolutions, including classic resolutions like 1024×768 pixels, and give more space for photos that open in the editor. The tools have been moved and the most used settings appear directly in the toolbar, while the rest appear as floating panels. According to the developer, the new user interface occupies “less than half the vertical space of the previous design” without sacrificing functionality.
PhotoDemon 9.0 has added support for new image formats. The new version has import and export support for PSP images, AVIF and animated WebP images. AVIF support is available, but the required encoder and decoder applications are not shipped with the program due to their size. The first time a user uploads or saves an AVIF file, the necessary data is downloaded. Import support is now available for XCF (GIMP), SVG, and SVGZ images.
It also includes built-in support for Adobe Photoshop plug-ins (8bf) and maintains support for lossless JPEG (JPEG-LS), comic book files (CBZ), Symbian images (MBM and AIF), and lossless images (QOI), although this needs to be improved.
There are other new features that you can review in the release notes available on its website along with the good number of contributors who have collaborated to release this major version and just like the download, totally free.
