screen-capture

Overview

After two years of work, PhotoDemon 9.0 is available to download. Highlights of this release include an improved user interface, new best-in-class selection tools (including support for multiple selections), support for many new image formats (AVIF, Paintshop Pro (PSP), GIMP (XCF), SVG, and more), content-aware fill, new filters and effects, and so much more.

Like all PhotoDemon releases, PhotoDemon 9.0 runs on any Windows PC sold in the past 20 years. All modern versions of Windows (XP through the latest Windows 11 insider builds) are fully supported.

Download the new release

If you already have a copy of PhotoDemon, you’re good to go! PhotoDemon will automatically update according to your preference in the Tools > Options > Updates menu.

If you want to manually download a fresh copy, click here or visit the download page.

Special thanks

This release was a monumental effort, and it exists thanks to many wonderful contributors who donated money, time, and feedback to the project.

If you find PhotoDemon useful, please consider making a small donation. Your support makes this 100% free, 100% open-source project possible.

Thank you especially to all of PhotoDemon’s Patreon supporters. Thank you also to everyone who has made a one-time donation.

Finally, thank you to everyone who contributed translations, bug reports, ideas, and feedback to this release, particularly during the 9.0 beta. I am grateful to all of you. ❤

What’s new and improved in this release

Some of these new features were discussed in great detail in the 2021 year in review article, so head there for an even deeper dive.

Otherwise, read on for a (very) long list of all the exciting changes you’ll find in PhotoDemon 9.0.

A quick bonus, before we begin…

Let me quickly share one extra surprise about PhotoDemon 9.0.

Despite providing many more tools, adjustments, and effects than PhotoDemon 8.4, PhotoDemon 9.0 actually uses fewer system resources than 8.4. Here is a Task Manager screenshot comparing the cold-start memory and resource usage between both versions:

task manager screenshot

That’s a 12% memory reduction, 21% system handle reduction, and 36% reduction in system graphics objects. As you start working with images, 9.0’s lower memory consumption is even more pronounced.

I just wanted to mention this up front because unlike other software, I try to make PhotoDemon smaller, lighter, and faster with each release. So as you read about all the fun new features in version 9.0, remember that these improvements won’t bog down your PC - in fact, PhotoDemon will run even better than it did before.

A revised and improved primary user interface

In version 9.0, PhotoDemon’s primary interface now gives you more room to work.

new-toolpanels

Tool options are now top-aligned against the menu bar, like other popular photo editors. The most common settings appear directly on the toolbar, and extended options live in well-organized flyout panels.

These flyout panels automatically disappear when you interact with the canvas. If you want ongoing access to a particular panel, you can click the “pin” icon in its bottom-right to keep it open.

This new UI takes up less than half the vertical space of the old design, while still providing one-click access to PhotoDemon’s many tool options.

This new interface is designed to work all the way down to ancient display resolutions (e.g. 1024x768), but if you have a modern display, some tools can automatically move advanced settings back into the toolbar itself as space allows. This animation shows an “opacity” setting automatically moving between a flyout panel (below brush size) and the toolbar itself as the main PhotoDemon window is resized:

toolpanel-autosize

Best-in-class selection tools, including composite selections

PhotoDemon has always supported editable selections. After creating a selection, you can further refine it by click-dragging the selection’s corners or sides, or use text boxes for precision adjustments.

PhotoDemon’s editable selections now come with multi-selection support. You can combine selections using Add, Subtract, and Intersect modes, and your last selection remains editable even when multiple selections are active. For example, here is a lasso selection merging with previous rectangle and ellipse selections in real-time:

multiple-selections

Honestly, this feature was a nightmare to develop, but I really wanted PhotoDemon to provide a best-in-class selection tool experience. I hope this release meets that goal.

Content-aware fill for smart object removal

Building on these new selection tool features, PhotoDemon now ships with a powerful content-aware fill tool. (This feature is also called “smart object removal” or “inpainting”.)

Simply select one or more objects that you want to remove from a photo, click Edit > Content-aware fill (or Select > Heal selected area if you prefer) and PhotoDemon takes care of the rest.

content-aware-fill

PhotoDemon’s content-aware fill has no restrictions. It works with all selection tools on any PC - yes, even on Windows XP.

The default settings work well in most conditions, but as you can see in the animation above, power users can further tweak the tool’s behavior. For example, in this panorama photo with missing pixels, I ask the inpainter to avoid sampling pixels to the left. This prevents the darker clouds on that side from bleeding into the lighter clouds I want to match:

content-aware-fill

Unlike other software, PhotoDemon’s content-aware fill does not rely on “AI” or other silly buzzwords. It does not require an internet connection or a database of training images. Instead, it studies each photo as-is, constructs different possible textures from nearby regions of the image, then repeatedly refines the result until it arrives at a result it “likes”.

I emphasize this because PhotoDemon’s content-aware fill is deliberately non-deterministic. If you don’t like its results, no problem! Just run the tool again and it will try a new approach. Running it several times in quick succession may produce better results than running it once, and afterwards you can step through the different fill results using Undo/Redo.

For example, here’s me using this strategy on the beach photo from before, but repeating the tool a few times to see different results:

content-aware-fill

In-depth support for many new image formats

Expanded image support was a large focus of this release. PhotoDemon now provides:

  • Import and export support for Corel Paintshop Pro (PSP) images. The new importer can even preserve PSP text layers as editable text layers inside PhotoDemon!
  • Import support for GIMP (XCF) images, including comprehensive coverage of layers in all color modes, integer and float precisions, and GIMP versions.
  • 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 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 on a compatible PC, PhotoDemon will offer to automatically download and configure a portable copy of libavif.
  • Import and export support for animated WebP images. Many of the screen capture animations on this page were created with this feature.
  • Import support for SVG and SVGZ images, c/o the open-source resvg library.

Other new formats supported by PhotoDemon include lossless JPEG (JPEG-LS), comic book archives (CBZ), old Symbian images (MBM, AIF), and lossless “quite OK” (QOI) images.

In other image format news, PhotoDemon now includes a best-in-class automatic GIF optimizer, and image formats that require palettes (like GIFs) benefit from a new neural-network color quantizer that constructs extremely high-quality palettes, even at low color counts.

neural_network_color_map

Best-in-class Image Resize tool

PhotoDemon’s Image > Resize tool now provides twelve advanced resampling modes. Even better, all modes support live interactive previews, so you no longer have to guess at the “best” resampling mode for your needs:

new-resize

Live previews work with both upsampling and downsampling, and all resampling modes provide high-speed (integer) and high-precision (floating point) versions. If you don’t want to mess with any of these intricacies, a smart “automatic” mode automatically chooses reasonable settings for you.

With these improvements, I believe PhotoDemon provides the best image resize experience of any free photo editor.

Built-in support for Adobe Photoshop plugins (8bf)

PhotoDemon now provides native support for Photoshop effect plugins (“8bf”, 32-bit only). This feature is possible thanks to spetric’s Photoshop-Plugin-Host library.

For example, here is Photoshop 5.0’s “Texturize” filter running natively within PhotoDemon:

screen-capture

New Color Lookup adjustment, with full support for 3D Lookup Table (LUT) files

Color lookup files (commonly called 3D LUTs, because they store 3-Dimensional Look-Up Tables) are used extensively in film, photography, and game development. These files encode any combination of color adjustments, including all the tools from PhotoDemon’s (extensive) Adjustments menu.

PhotoDemon now provides full support for 3D LUTs in the new Adjustments > Color > Color lookup menu. 3DL, CUBE, and LOOK formats are supported at any complexity. PhotoDemon also ships with a free set of color lookups that mimic your favorite one-click social media filters:

color-lookup Bryce Canyon photo by Daniel Lambson

You can also make your own 3D LUT files. Just load a photo and apply any combination of adjustments, then use the new File > Export > Color lookup tool to save your changes to 3DL, CUBE, or LOOK format. That combination of adjustments are now ready to use in Adobe Photoshop or any other LUT-capable photo editor - even if those photo editors don’t provide the same adjustment features as PhotoDemon!

You can also search online for “free 3D LUTs” to find more color adjustments than any human being could ever need or want. (There are also many paid LUT offerings, if you’re into that.)

I believe PhotoDemon is the first free, open-source photo editor to provide full coverage for all major 3D LUT formats. This is also a relatively recent addition to Photoshop, so it’s exciting to include it here for free!

Full list of changes by category

Those are some of the biggest improvements coming to PhotoDemon 9.0, but they are far from the only ones. (I haven’t even gotten to new effects yet!)

It would take too long to discuss every new feature at this same level of detail, so here is an abbreviated list of other highlights in the 9.0 beta.

Effects

bump-map

effect_distort_droste

effect_render_truchet

effects_animation_foreground

gradient_flow

  • Greatly improved Effects > Transform > Perspective tool, with new live preview support and precision control for corner coordinates.

effect_transform_perspective

effect_artistic_stained_glass

Adjustments

adjustments_lighting_dehaze

adjustments_curves

adjustments_photo_filter

File formats

  • Comprehensive import and export support for Corel Paintshop Pro (psp, pspimage) images, including many text and vector layer features.

  • Comprehensive import support for GIMP XCF images, including full coverage for all color modes, precisions (integer and float), and XCF versions. GZ-compressed XCF files are also supported.

  • 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 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 offers to download and configure a portable copy of libavif.

  • Comprehensive import and export support for animated WebP images, including direct export from PhotoDemon’s built-in screen recording tool (Tools > Animated screen capture).

animated-screen-capture

Image and Layer tools

  • All-new selection tool engine, including full support for multiple selections. All selection tools support new “Add”, “Subtract”, and “Intersect” combine modes. In addition, a new canvas selection renderer automatically highlights the merged region of composite selections. (Other new rendering UI features are available on each selection toolpanel).

  • New Edit > Content-aware fill (and corresponding Select > Heal selected area) tools can intelligently remove objects from photos. Just select the object you want to remove, then click the menu to remove it!

  • 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 these improvements!)

  • New Layer > Replace tools, for quickly replacing an existing layer with data from the clipboard or any arbitrary image file.

layer_replace

  • Overhauled Image > Crop tool, including new support for retaining editable text layers after cropping (instead of rasterizing them).

  • The Advanced text tool provides a new “stretch to fit” option, which automatically sizes the font to fit within the text layer’s current boundaries.

text_stretch_to_fit

  • New lock aspect ratio toggle on the Move/Size tool.

  • New Edit > Stroke and Edit > Fill tools allow you to easily trace the active selection outline (or fill its interior) with custom pens or brushes.

edit_fill_and_stroke

Batch processor

batch_process_animation.png

User interface

  • A new compact toolpanel design requires less on-screen space, while still providing one-click access to all of PhotoDemon’s advanced 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!)

  • Adjustment and Effect dialogs are no longer fixed-size - you can freely resize them at run-time, and the preview area will resize accordingly.

resize_windows.webp

session restore

language editor

Other

These are just the highlights of version 9.0. For an exhaustive list of changes, visit the project’s commit log.

(This release represents more than 1700 intermediary builds, so there are a lot of improvements, large and small, across nearly every aspect of the project.)

In conclusion

Thank you for using PhotoDemon.

I am so grateful to everyone who contributed to this release, whether through Patreon, GitHub, or by sending old-fashioned emails. A full list of contributors is available on the Contributors page, or in the Help > About menu of PhotoDemon itself. PhotoDemon’s ever-expanding community is full of amazing individuals, and they’re the reason I can give away this state-of-the-art project for free.

If you find PhotoDemon useful, please consider making a small one-time donation or joining our Patreon family. I’d love to add you to the next contributor list!

Above all, please enjoy version 9.0, and best wishes for a happy and healthy rest of 2022.