Free software download

Paint.NET is an efficient, small, light photo editor with a minimalistic GUI. It’s impressive how it can have so many tools in just 1.8MB of space and it uses less then 55 MB of RAM to run. Although it wouldn’t be fair to compare it with Photoshop, it is true that many home users will find Paint.NET perfect for their needs and really easy to use.

Unfortunately, it limits you to edit only one image at a time and there are two major features missing: the magnetic lasso for the selection of objects in a picture and support for Twain-scanners/cameras. That said, the program is constantly updated and you can always find different ways to do things.

A very interesting feature is the possibility to install many different plug-ins that you can choose in the program’s forum. You can for example install a shape3D tool, a pack of custom brushes, a motion sharpen plug-in and or silhouette tool.

Paint.NET is a very promising photo editor which is good enough for non professional users. Although it lacks some important functions and limits you to work on one picture at a time, it’s useful enough for everyday use.

Review by Francesca Migliorini

Here’s a simple but very effective program that you’ll love. ResourcesExtract allows you to extract, from an exe or dll file, all the pictures and videos contained in it. For example, if you’ve always wanted to have the icons that a particular application uses, this program lets you access them in seconds.

From the main (and only) program menu, select the path of the application you need to extract the images from, then select the destination folder and choose what do you want to get: icons, cursors, bitmaps, avi files, etc. Press the ‘Start’ button and ResourcesExtract will open a folder with all the files extracted, ready for you to use almost immediately.

The software’s layout is really basic and there are not many options you can choose from, but on the other hand, the program is simple and effective. It would have been good to have a preview of the files contained within the exe file in order to choose just the images we needed and to avoid extracting things we don’t really want.

ResoucesExtract is a powerful tool that lets you extract images, icons and AVI files contained in an application. This can be very useful for web developers, but also end users who want to have a particular image of a program they like available to use.

Review by Francesca Migliorini