Oriens Enhancer Gold v.2.0
http://www.oriens-solution.com/enhancer/
= interesting, promising
Software Tool (Win)
FREE

Created by 21 year old Indian multimedia mastermind Bahrur Rahman, Oriens Enhancer Gold is a new, very promising free image editor, very rich in tools and functionalities.

As a functionality-rich image editor Oriens Enhancer is one among few of the possible free alternatives to industry giants like Adobe Photoshop or Jasc Paintshop Pro.

Oriens Enhancer provides you with a complete set of advanced image editing tools to manipulate digital images including a selection tool (- freehand selection is possible! -), a stamp tool and a color picker.

Unlike most other free or low-cost graphical editors (Serif Photoplus is an exception), Oriens Enhancer even allows you to work with layers. Though the functionality is somewhat limited at this stage, is nonetheless very handy and it is being further developed.

Oriens Enhancer supports and opens 40 different image formats. Digital images can be optimized, compressed and saved in 20 alternative graphic file formats.

Oriens Enhancer vast array of features can make its use difficult to novice digital image editors or with people who have little experience with technical image editing terms.

Oriens Enhancer throws in a few handy extra-features like a utility to screen-capture (to photograph anything on your screen (entire screen or selected area) and an Icon Extractor to extract icons that are part of application/software files.

Oriens Enhancer does not stop at this and includes in its toolset many other facilities including:

1) GIF Animator Cum Frame extractor.

2) Thumbnail Browser. This image browser can display thumbnails from 40 different formats.

3) Screen Saver and Slide Show production facility.
Screensavers can be generated dynamically from 40 image formats with full user customization about the layout, colors and time elapsed. No need to convert different images to a compatible format. Oriens Enhancer GOLD will intelligently convert all the different image formats to compatible format.

4) Icon and Image Extractor from EXE/DLL/OCX/FRX/CTX/DOX/DSX/ICO files.

5) Batch Converter of different image formats. Full automated conversion of graphic file formats. Supports conversion of entire folders. Supported image output formats are BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, PCX, TGA, TIFF.

6) Image Maps generator.

7) ASCII to PDF Converter. Conversion to PDF format with full customization of Fonts, Page Layout (height and width), font size etc. Only ASCII based files can be converted with this facility (Txt, html, xml, css, frm, rtf, ini, asp, cgi).

8) +40 filters to apply to images - Filters Include - Dilate, Painting, Erode, Invert, Greyscale, Sepiatone, Relief, Edge Enhance, Emboss, Contour, Saturation, Diffuse, Luminousity, Blur, Engrave, Soften, Sharpen, Noise, Mosaic, Talcom Powder etc...

9) +40 effects to enhance images - Effects include - Haftone, Pixelize, Ccontrast, Brightness, Gamma Correction, Thermique, XBlack, Photoshop Lens, Waves, Bend, Fold, Rotate, Stretch, Tile, Twirl, Grid, Flare, Noise, Scanliness, Under Glass, Under Curtain, and more.

10) Image Merging - Merging different images with transparency from 0-100.

Oriens Enhancer may not be completely stable and bug-free yet, but it does have a lot to offer for what it asks. Some users report Oriens Enhancer crashing or getting locked. One simple troubleshooting advice that I can provide is too delete the oriens.dat file when the application does crash systematically or gets locked each time you start it. Be aware that when you do that your settings are lost and the default settings are restored. Out of that, you only need to give some more time to Bahrur to refine its gem.

A discussion forum supporting Oriens software products is accessible at:
http://www12.brinkster.com/greenkhan/ forum/default.asp

To effectively compare this tool with similarly independently developed free or low-cost tools, you can check my other reviews of free image editors:

a) Best low-cost and free image editors Free

b) Easy-To-Use Image Editor With Advanced Functions

c) PhotoPlus 5

d) Secret Low-cost Image Editing Powerhouse

You can download a free copy of Oriens Enhancer GOLD at:
http://www.oriens-solution.com/ Enhancer/Download.asp (11.07 MB)

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