PhotoFiltre is one of the greatest and easy to use photo editing programs. Here you can have brief but crucial directions on its functions and options.

Enabling the Filters

Filters in certain menus are available only in 16 million colors without transparency because most of them recompute and modify colors. For example, they are disabled for GIF images and images in indexed colors mode. If you do not have access to the filters, here is what you should do:

* Select the menu “Image / Transparent color” (for an image with a transparent color), then click on the option “Disable transparency”
* Select the menu “Image / Mode / RGB color”

Image adjustment

Toolbar buttons let you adjust luminosity, contrast and saturation of colors. If your image is too dark or too clear, you must first carry out a corresponding gamma correction using the relevant menu or buttons.

Selection tools

PhotoFiltre offers two types of selection. The first type gathers the automatic forms (rectangle, ellipse, triangle, rhombus). The second type corresponds to the lasso modes and polygon. Both will let you define a custom shape by drawing contour or by a succession of lines. Each selection can be safeguarded in a file to be re-used later (“Selection” menu).

The “Edit / Stroke and fill” menu lets you draw and fill these shapes. You can also apply symmetries and rotations to the selection using the “Selection / Transformation” menu.

Tool pallet

This consists of drawing tools such as the pipette (color sampler), scrolling tool, line tool, fill tool, spray tool, paintbrush, advanced paintbrush, blur tool and clone stamp. PhotoFiltre offers standard shapes (circles and squares of various sizes) but also more varied forms (oblique line, sheet, star…)

Most of these functions are available only in 16 million colors mode.

Text insertion

The text module offers several parameters. For 90 degrees or -90 degrees text rotation, it’s better to use the “Edit / Transform” menu, if your system doesn’t manage smoothing. You can also create mirror effects with the horizontal or vertical symmetry functions, available in the same menu. Certain options such as outer bevel and blur optimize require a larger text size.

As long as the text is not validated (menu item “Edit / Validate text”) you can move it with the mouse and modify it (double-click or select the menu item “Edit / Text options”).

Merging images

Here are the steps to easily merge images :

* Open the two images
* Copy one of two images (CTRL+C)
* Switch to the other image
* Select “Edit / Paste special / Assemble” and choose the position to paste the clipboard contents

You can use this method to place images end to end in order to create a panorama.

Cf. PhotoFiltre Hotkeys | PhotoFiltre Masks | PhotoFiltre Main Page