What is paintstar? Paintstar is an image editor program that as of version 2.7 is freeware. Paintstar was developed by Zhenzhou Wang. Info, quoted from the official site:
Introduction
PaintStar is a versatile digital image processing software suitable for such tasks as retouching of photographs, composing and authoring images, image morphing, screen capture, and displaying image thumbnail in Windows Explorer context menu. It supports alpha, layer, path ,and the most common editing techniques. PaintStar has many of the tools and filters you would expect to find in commercial offerings, and some interesting extras as well. A Brief List of Features
- Full suite of painting tools including paintbrush, pencil, eraser, airbrush, filter brush, color retouching, blur/sharpening,smudge,and cloning. Many customizable brushes, textures, gradients, and 26 methods of combining modes suppported.[See Several Examples]
- Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear, perspective,flip,and wrap. Auto antialias supported.[See Transformation Examples]
- Image Morphing supported. With this technique, you can create a sequence of intermediate frames that seamlessly transform one image to another and generate output in a form of gif animation or image file sequence.[See Morph Maker Tutorial]
- Gradient Fill tools include linear, radial,square,conical(symmetric),conical(asymmetric) and shapeburst. Multiple colors supported.
- Selection tools including rectangular, elliptical, free, fuzzy and paths. Add, subtract, invert, antialias and feather selections supported.
- Zoom 10% - 2000% display, and show grid supported.
- More then 30 File formats supported include JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, TGA, PCX, BMP and many others.
- Color conversion supported include several different dithering methods and palette options.
- Alpha channel (transparency) supported.
- Displays Histograms (RGB, HSV, HSL, CMYK).
- Displays EXIF information. EXIF 2.2 supported.
- TWAIN supported for scanners and digital cameras.
- Multiple Layers, 26 methods of combining modes suppported.
- Multiple Paths supported. You can add,delete,insert point to the curve and adjust point in the curve just like vector drawing programs such as Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw.[See Path Examples, Path Templets Effect]
- Multiple Undo and Redo supported. You can set up the number of Undo's from 3 to 99.
- More than 100 Filters/Effects.Application of 3x3 filters supported.[See A Few Filters, 3D Button Tutorial, 3D Text Tutorial]
- Screen capture supported.You can capture selected or fixed regions of the desktop, as well as active windows or individual controls (menus, dialogs etc.), which can be easily selected by an on-screen indicator which outlines the area to be captured.[See Screen Capture Example]
- Displays thumbnail of selected image in Windows Explorer context menu just like ACD System Picaview.[See Screenshot]
Awards
Minimum System Requirements
- Microsoft Windows 95, 98, Me, NT 4.0, 2000, or XP.
- Memory: 32MB of RAM.
- 4 MB hard disk space.
- Video display of at least 256 colours.
- Mouse or other pointing device
PaintStar is distributed as freeware. That's right. 100% Free! No cost to you ever. No limitations. No Adware. No Spyware. PaintStar 2.70 is incredibly small! File size is just 2.57 MB.
So, why am I posting this here, you might ask? Because, it's a great program, and most, if not all links on the official site are down, and the site appears to not have been updated in years. Luckily, I have saved and uploaded a copy of the installation executable and tutorials. You can get them below.
Installation excecutable
Download
Tutorials
Download
