Evelands Dot Net

• 
  • Name: The Gimp
  • Url: http://www.gimp.org/,http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/
  • About: The Gnu Image Manipulation Program. Think a GPL'd Ph***shop... It never ceases to amaze me the effort coworkers will expend trying to use MS Paint to do what would take 45 seconds in the Gimp.
         It has a learning curve ; check out Gimp for the Artistically Challenged and Grokking the Gimp(click 'Book')
         Under windows you can also use some Ph***shop plugins. Grab psipi.exe, extract with path into your Gimp install directory. Click the Xtns button, then Photoshop Plugin Settings. Point it to some plugins and you're set.

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• 
  • Name: GREYCstoration
  • Url: http://www.greyc.ensicaen.fr/~dtschump/greycstoration/
  • About: A sweet de-noise app/plugin. The math is beyond me, but I'll say this: it beats anything else I've used for removing noise from an image. Say you've got a jpeg compressed at like, 50% with all sorts of artifacts. This guy removes noise while maintaining the curves and edges and it does it better than any of the other guys Available as a plug-in for the gimp or as a stand alone app (now with GUI goodness...)
    
    The image above shows the same image scaled 200%;
         Top Left - no interpolation
         Top Right - linear interpolation
         Bottom Left - cubic interpolation
         Bottom Right - no interpolation, GREYCstoration with default values

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• 
  • Name: Blender
  • Url: http://www.blender.org
  • About: Blender is a 3D modeling and animation tool. The learning curve is steep (as in any modeling app), so be sure to check out some of the tutorials: Blender Nation's collection, Blender 3D: Noob to Pro, and others.

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• 
  • Name: POV Ray
  • Url: http://www.povray.org/
  • About: The Persistence of Vision Raytracer. This is a classic ray tracer. Some examples of what this bad boy is capable of are here. Again, a steep learning curve. The online POV-Ray tutorial is a good start.

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• 
  • Name: ImageMagick
  • Url: http://sourceforge.net/projects/imagemagick/
  • About: The swiss army knife of image conversion

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• 
  • Name: Inkscape
  • Url: http://www.inkscape.org/
  • About: Vector drawing goodness. Can handle most ai files.

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• 
  • Name: imgv
  • Url: http://imgv.sourceforge.net/
  • About: A great image browser; the interface looks a bit like a console app, but it's smoking fast.

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• 
  • Name: mozImage
  • Url: http://mozimage.mozdev.org/
  • About: An image browser in the form of a firefox extension.