PhotoDemon is an ultra-lightweight, installation-free, open-source photo editor that is only 14 MB in size, but provides comprehensive photo editing tools. PhotoDemon does not require installation and does not require administrator rights to run and can be run on any Windows machine (XP to Win 11) as a portable application.
PhotoDemon 9.0 is now released and highlights of this release include: an improved user interface, new selection tools (including support for multiple selection), support for many new image formats (AVIF, Paintshop Pro (PSP), GIMP (XCF), SVG, etc.), content-aware padding, new filters and effects, and more.
Improved main user interface
In version 9.0, PhotoDemon's main interface provides more workspace, and the new UI takes up half the vertical space.
Tool options are aligned to the top of the menu bar, frequently used settings are displayed on the toolbar, and extended options are located in a pop-up panel.
These popup panels automatically disappear when interacting with the canvas. If you need to pin a specific panel, you can click the "Pushpin" icon in the lower right corner to keep it open.
New selection tools (including compound selection)
PhotoDemon has always supported editable selections. After you create a selection, you can further refine the selection by clicking and dragging its corners or edges, or use the text boxes to make precise adjustments.
Editable selections for PhotoDemon now come with multi-select support. Selections can be combined using Add, Subtract, and Intersect modes , making your last selection editable even when multiple selections are active . For example, here's a lasso selection that merges in real-time with the previous rectangle and ellipse selections:
Content-Aware Fill
Building on these new selection tool capabilities, PhotoDemon now comes with a powerful content-aware fill tool. (This feature is also known as "Smart Object Removal" or "Repair".)
Just select one or more objects to remove from your photo, click Edit > Content-aware fill(or Select > Heal selected area), and PhotoDemon will take care of the rest.
PhotoDemon's content-aware fill has no limits. It works with all selection tools on any PC , even on Windows XP.
Advanced users can further adjust the behavior of the tool. For example, in this panorama with missing pixels, the inpainter is asked to avoid sampling the pixels on the left. This prevents that darker cloud from seeping into the lighter cloud that I want to match:
Support for new image formats
Expanded image support is a big focus of this release. PhotoDemon now offers:
- Import and export support for Corel Paintshop Pro (PSP ) images. The new importer can even save PSP text layers as editable text layers in PhotoDemon!
- Import support for GIMP (XCF ) images, including full coverage of all color modes, integer and floating point precision, and layers for the GIMP version.
- Import and export support for the new AVIF file format , c/o open source libavif library . PhotoDemon does not provide these libraries by default due to the complexity of AVIF file support (encoder+decoder application is 3x bigger than PhotoDemon!) and they are only available for 64-bit systems. If you try to open or save an AVIF file on a compatible PC, PhotoDemon will offer to automatically download and configure a portable copy of libavif.
- Import and export support for WebP images. Many of the screenshot animations on this page were created using this feature.
- Import support for SVG and SVGZ images , provided by the open source resvg library .
Other new formats supported by PhotoDemon include lossless JPEG ( JPEG-LS ), comic book archives ( CBZ ), legacy Symbian images ( MBM , AIF ), and lossless "pretty good" images ( QOI ).
Other updates can be viewed in the official announcement .