HeliosPaint 1.5

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(5) 1 Votes

Date updated

October 26, 2012

Developer

D OSBORNE | (more products)

All time downloads

1,399

License

Free

Platform

Windows

Size

1.60 MB

Description of HeliosPaint 1.5

Edit photos, drawings and icons with ease

HeliosPaint is a feature-rich, easy-to-use and powerful paint program for editing photos, drawings and icons. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Linux and Unix.

Key features

• Pencil for editing pixels.
• Curved, straight and freehand lines with choice of width, dash pattern, line joint and arrow heads.
• Paint Brush with adjustable size and edge feathering.
• Eraser with adjustable size and edge feathering.
• Spray Can with adjustable size and edge feathering or global spray option.
• Paint Can with local and global replace. Colour bleed sensitivity allows nearby similar colours to be painted.
• Shape tool for creating freehand, regular polygon, star, moon and heart shapes.
• Text entry with choice of font, style, underline and rotation.
• Image filters: RGB levels, HSB levels, HSL levels, contrast, gamma, temperature and tint, invert, gray, black and white, colour filter, sharpen, blur, edge feathering, edge detection, oil painting effect, emboss, unsharp mask, chrome, sepia tone, threshold.
• Image colour and transparency adjustment by flat, round, rectangular and 'fit to shape' gradient patterns. This allows areas of the image to be darkened, brightened and colour enhanced.
• Image flip, scale up, scale down, rotate, shear, perspective view.
• Full colour pallet with adjustable transparency and colour grabber.
• Zoom in/out with optional zoom grid.
• Text and image paste from clipboard. Image and image segment copy/cut onto clipboard.
• Scissors, lasso and wand for selecting and moving an area of the image. Sensitivity of lasso and wand is adjustable. Transparency of overlaid area is adjustable. Scissors can cut out various shapes including regular polygons, stars and hearts. When part of the image is selected, all paint operations apply only to that area.
• Save selected area as transparent gif or transparent png file.
• Undo and redo.
• Printing with auto fit to page.
• Export image to PDF file.
• Simple and easy to use help file.
• Reads and writes image file formats: bmp, gif, jpg/jpeg, pct/pict, pcx, pgm, png, ppm, psd, ras, tga, tif/tiff, wbmp, xpm.
• Supports images up to 12 megapixels in size (a high end computer is recommended for working with very large images).

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Editor's review for HeliosPaint

When it comes to painting or photo editing programs, it always seems like you have to take the good with the bad. Simple programs may do a few things well, but if you want something slightly beyond the basics, you won’t find it. Conversely, full-featured paint programs are prohibitively expensive and come with options you’ll never use in a million years. HeliosPaint puts an end to all that. It’s a full-featured photo editor and painting program that is absolutely free.

Better yet, its user-friendly interface ensures that all of its tools and editing capabilities are easily located and used by anyone from a casual user touching up a Facebook picture to a professional artist or graphic designer working on a make-or-break project.

It’s hard to know where to start with HeliosPaint’s canvas of features. For those in a cross-platform environment, however, its most important feature may be that it runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Unix. The program uses Java portability to provide the same user experience on each platform.

Let’s get down to painting. HeliosPaint gives you several different tools to work with. The pencil is the detailed touch-up tool that allows you to edit individual pixels to smoothly blend lines or offer a clear contrast. When you’re painting in broad strokes, use the paintbrush. You can adjust the size on the fly, and it also includes edge feathering. Similarly, the size of the eraser can also be adjusted, and it supports edge feathering as well.

Things get a little more fun with the spray can, the size of which can also be adjusted, plus it includes a global spray option to spray multiple drawings simultaneously. The included paint can allows for local and global replacement and includes color bleed sensitivity, which allows for the painting of similar colors nearby. Of course, no paint program would be complete without a shape tool to allow you to create regular polygons, plus stars, moons and hearts. You can also use the shape tool freehand to paint custom shapes of any dimension.

HeliosPaint comes with a bevy of image filters, including but not limited to HSB levels, HSL levels, RGB levels, temperature and tint, gamma, contrast, invert, blur, oil painting effect, edge detection and a whole lot more. Images can also be flipped, scaled up or down, rotated or viewed in “perspective view,” which changes the angle of the image.

You can also adjust the color and transparency of an image in four different ways: flat, round, rectangular and fit to shape. Use this to darken or brighten an image or to enhance its colors. HeliosPaint includes a full color palette with a color grabber that makes it easier to switch colors on the fly. Adjustable transparency allows you to create multilayered images and unique effects.

Cutting out small pieces of an image and moving them around is a snap with the scissor, wand and lasso tools. You can either manually select the area to be cut or use the scissors to cut a particular shape. Of course, HeliosPaint comes with text manipulation tools as well so you can add or delete text and change font, style and rotation. HeliosPaint can work with just about every file type in use today including BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCT, PCX, PNG, TIF, WBMP, XPM and more.

There’s no need to spend hundreds on a “professional” paint program or photo editor; HeliosPaint can do it all for free.