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PhotoDemon Help

Welcome to PhotoDemon

PhotoDemon is a free portable photo editor for Microsoft Windows. You can download the application itself at photodemon.org, or download its source code from GitHub.

Download the app Download the source code

PhotoDemon was designed to be as intuitive as possible. If you’ve used other photo editors (like Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, Krita, or Paint.NET), you’ll feel very at home here!

If you are new to photo editing, however, some of PhotoDemon’s terminology and features may be confusing. This guide is here to help.

To search for a specific topic, use the search bar at the top of this page. You can also explore the topic tree on your left.

Continue to Getting Started

Rough outline for docs (WIP):

  1. Quick Start guide
  2. Download and extract the program
  3. Running PhotoDemon for the first time
  4. Main UI
    1. Toolbar (left panel)
      1. File tools
      2. Undo tools
      3. Non-destructive tools
      4. Select tools
      5. Text tools
      6. Paint tools
    2. Tool options (bottom panel)
    3. Image panel (right panel)
      1. Navigator subpanel
      2. Color subpanel
      3. Layer subpanel
    4. Image canvas
    5. Image tabstrip
  5. Menus
    1. File
      1. New
      2. Open
      3. Open Recent
      4. Import
      5. Close / Close all
      6. Save / Save copy (lossless) / Save as
      7. Revert
      8. Batch operations
        1. Batch process
        2. Batch repair
      9. Print
    2. Edit
      1. Undo / Redo
      2. Undo History
      3. Repeat last action
      4. Fade last action
      5. Cut / Cut from layer / Copy / Copy from Layer
      6. Paste as new image / Paste as new Layer
      7. Empty clipboard
    3. View
    4. Image
      1. Duplicate
      2. Resize
      3. Content-aware resize
      4. Canvas size
      5. Fit canvas to active layer / Fit canvas around all layers
      6. Crop to selection
      7. Trim empty borders
      8. Rotate
        1. Straighten
        2. 90 clockwise / 90 counter-clockwise / 180
        3. Arbitrary
      9. Flip horizontal / Flip vertical
      10. Metadata
      11. Edit metadata
      12. Count unique colors
      13. Map photo location
    5. Layer
      1. Add
      2. Delete
      3. Merge up / Merge down
      4. Order
      5. Orientation
      6. Size
      7. Crop to selection
      8. Transparency
        1. Make color transparent
        2. Remove transparency
      9. Rasterize
      10. Flatten image
      11. Merge visible layers
    6. Select
      1. All / None / Invert
      2. Grow
      3. Shrink
      4. Border
      5. Feather
      6. Sharpen
      7. Erase selected area
      8. Load selection / Save current selection
      9. Export
    7. Adjustments
      1. Auto correct
      2. Auto enhance
      3. Black and white
      4. Brightness and contrast
      5. Color balance
      6. Curves
      7. Levels
      8. Shadows and highlights
      9. Vibrance
      10. White balance
      11. Channels
        1. Channel mixer
        2. Rechannel
        3. Maximum / minimum channel
        4. Shift left / shift right
      12. Color
        1. Color balance
        2. White balance
        3. Hue and saturation
        4. Temperature
        5. Tint
        6. Vibrance
        7. Black and white
        8. Colorize
        9. Replace color
        10. Sepia
      13. Histogram
        1. Display
        2. Equalize
        3. Stretch
      14. Invert
      15. Lighting
        1. Brightness and contrast
        2. Curves
        3. Gamma
        4. Levels
        5. Shadows and highlights
      16. Monochrome
        1. Color to monochrome
        2. Monochrome to gray
      17. Photography
        1. Exposure
        2. HDR
        3. Photo filters
        4. Red-eye removal
        5. Split toning
    8. Effects
      1. Artistic
        1. Colored pencil
        2. Comic book
        3. Figured glass (dents)
        4. Film noir
        5. Glass tiles
        6. Kaleidoscope
        7. Modern art
        8. Oil painting
        9. Plastic wrap
        10. Posterize
        11. Relief
        12. Stained glass
      2. Blur
        1. Box blur
        2. Gaussian blur
        3. Surface blur
        4. Motion blur
        5. Radial blur
        6. Zoom blur
        7. Kuwahara filter
        8. Symmetric nearest-neighbor
      3. Distort
        1. Correct existing distortion
        2. Donut
        3. Lens
        4. Pinch and whirl
        5. Poke
        6. Ripple
        7. Squish
        8. Swirl
        9. Waves
        10. Miscellaneous
      4. Edge
        1. Emboss
        2. Enhance edges
        3. Find edges
        4. Range filter
        5. Trace contour
      5. Light and shadow
        1. Black light
        2. Cross-screen
        3. Rainbow
        4. Sunshine
        5. Dilate
        6. Erode
      6. Natural
        1. Atmosphere
        2. Fog
        3. Ignite
        4. Lava
        5. Metal
        6. Snow
        7. Underwater
      7. Noise
        1. Add film grain
        2. Add RGB noise
        3. Anisotropic diffusion
        4. Bilateral filter
        5. Harmonic mean
        6. Mean shift
        7. Median
      8. Pixelate
        1. Color halftone
        2. Crystallize
        3. Fragment
        4. Mezzotint
        5. Mosaic
      9. Sharpen
        1. Sharpen
        2. Unsharp masking
      10. Stylize
        1. Antique
        2. Diffuse
        3. Outline
        4. Palettize
        5. Portrait glow
        6. Solarize
        7. Twins
        8. Vignetting
      11. Transform
        1. Pan and zoom
        2. Perspective
        3. Polar conversion
        4. Rotate
        5. Shear
        6. Spherize
      12. Custom filter
    9. Tools
      1. Language
      2. Language editor
      3. Theme
      4. Record macro
      5. Play macro
      6. Recent macros
      7. Options
      8. Plugin manager
    10. Window
    11. Toolbox
    12. Tool options / Layers
    13. Image tabstrip
    14. Next / Previous image
    15. Help

Testing a link to Getting Started.