PhotoDemon 9.0 is the latest major version of the image editor and comes after two years of development. Free and open sourceit has more than enough features for a pedestrian user.

When it comes to free alternatives to Photoshop and other professional applications, GIMP stands out, but like Adobe development, it is “heavy” due to the sheer number of features it contains, and has a steep learning curve if you want to take advantage. to some otherwise excellent applications.

PhotoDemon 9.0, lighter and with a new interface

There are other editing tools that offer more than the basics without as many features and are easier to use. This handily falls into this group and was released with significant UI improvements, support for new image formats, reduced resource usage, built-in support for Adobe Photoshop plug-ins, and more.

One of the main improvements is that uses fewer resources than the previous version. For example, it uses 12% less memory than the previous version during a cold start. And it is the high consumption of resources that is standard for this group of editing applications.

The user interface was redesigned for the occasion. Work with different screen resolutions, including classic resolutions such as 1024×768 pixels, and give more space for photos that open in the editor. The tools have been moved and the most used settings appear directly in the toolbar, while the rest appear as floating panels. According to the developer, the new user interface is busy “less than half the vertical space of the previous design” without sacrificing functionality.

PhotoDemon 9.0 has been added support for new image formats. The new version has support for importing and exporting PSP images, AVIF and animated WebP images. AVIF support is available, but the required encoder and decoder applications are not bundled with the program due to their size. The first time a user uploads or saves an AVIF file, the necessary data is downloaded. Import support is now available for XCF (GIMP), SVG and SVGZ images.

It also includes built-in support for Adobe Photoshop plug-ins (8bf) and maintains support for lossless JPEG (JPEG-LS), comic book files (CBZ), Symbian images (MBM and AIF) and lossless images (QOI), although this needs improvement.

There are other new features that you can check out in the release notes available on its website, along with the large number of contributors who worked together on this major release and just like the download, completely free.