Image Tools for Windows

Do you handle a lot of image files? Snapshots, archives, and pictures to upload can pile up, especially when they need to be resized, cropped, converted, or watermarked. Sometimes you just want a quick, easy way to do those jobs. Or maybe your PC didn't come bundled with a big-box graphics package and you just want a simple assortment of essential image tools. How about Image Tools? That's the name of IMDrops' free bundle of fast, powerful image apps that handle all the basics we mentioned, and more, including sharing screenshots and uploading image files.

Image Tools has a plain user interface, but it's well designed, with an Images field above an Info panel and progress bar on a subtle gray background. We started with the Main menu, which let us add images to start a new project or open an existing one. We browsed our Pictures library and added an album of assorted JPEGs and PNGs: So far, so easy. We highlighted an image and clicked Process. The Process menu offers a good selection: Adjust brightness, gamma, and contrast; crop, deborder, flip, and rotate; add watermarks; and convert to grayscale, negative, and sepia. We started with a sepia image. After we'd chosen a destination, Image Tools presented a small pop-up that let us set the level (Quality) of sepia transformation. We previewed and opened the new image in our usual image viewer. Image Tools had done an excellent job. Next we tried a negative image with a similar process and equally excellent results. The watermarking tool is neat; it has X- and Y-axis settings and let us browse to any watermarking file we had. The More menu just leads to an About file with a Web link, and the Language menu offered two options, English and Russian. The IMDrops menu accesses the screenshot and image publishing and sharing tools, which all use a similar linking tool.

Image Tools offers excellent image processing capabilities in an easy-to-use package, and it's free. We think many users will like the sound of that, but more to the point, they'll like the look of it, too.