Summary: Shareware can often be essential in any typical visualisation workflow. Some of these programs offer functionality which is comparable with far more expensive commercial software, and some are simple productivity tools designed to carry out a specific operation quickly and efficiently. Many of these applications are "portable" which means that they may be carried around on a USB drive, and deployed instantly on any PC without the need for installation, and without making any changes to the registry.
Links | Shareware
GeoExpress
A useful tool for quickly generating geo-referenced TIF and JPG files for use in Dynamite VSP from MrSID image files, and can also be used for resampling large image files. A trial version is available as a free download from this site.
http://www.lizardtech.com/products/geo/
Posted on Friday 15th June 2007
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GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program)
So you don’t have the budget for Adobe Photoshop and you are looking for a free alternative? GIMP contains much of the functionality of Photoshop, and looks and feels very similar in practise. It is a freely distributed application and is great for such tasks as photo retouching, compositing, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.
A portable version of GIMP is available - this does not require installing, and does not modify your registry settings. This version of GIMP can easily be carried around on a USB stick for deployment on any PC.
Posted on Wednesday 14th February 2007
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ImageMagick
ImageMagick is a software suite that creates, edits, and composes bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats (about 100) including DPX, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PDF, PhotoCD, PNG, Postscript, SVG, and TIFF. Use ImageMagick to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves.
The beauty of ImageMagick is that it is command line driven, which means that processes can be run from any standard batch file, such as image conversion, resampling, and even compositing (layering). Compositing is particularly useful for automatically overlaying frames that have been rendered in several layers (for instance when compositing frames containing a design model over previously rendered frames featuring only the existing ground model).
Posted on Thursday 15th February 2007
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Irfanview
IrfanView is a very fast, and compact image viewer for Windows. It provides an extremely efficient way of scrolling through directories containing thousands of image files, and features a powerful batch processor for applying changes to thousands of images instantly. Batch commands include file format conversion, blurring, sharpening, brightness, gamma, contrast, resizing, cropping, flipping, rotating, renaming, and much more.
IrfanView is ideal for quickly batch pre-processing entire folders of single frame image files which have been rendered for eventual composition into an animation, and as a shareware application - this program is FREE.
Posted on Thursday 22nd February 2007
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Photolapse
If you have rendered an animation to a series of JPG files and you are looking for a cheap way to composite these frames into an AVI file - look no further. PhotoLapse is a simple JPG to AVI converter which was originally intended for making timelapse movies of large sequences of jpg stills. This functionality makes Photolapse a cheap but effective solution for compositing rendered JPG sequences from DVSP into AVI movies, something that would normally require far more expensive software such as Adobe Premiere.
PhotoLapse is a portable application - it does not need to be installed, and does not modify your registry. The application may therefore be carried on a USB drive for use on any PC.
http://home.hccnet.nl/s.vd.palen/index.html
Posted on Wednesday 14th February 2007
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