PhotoDemon is a portable photo editor. It is 100% free and 100% open-source.
PhotoDemon provides a comprehensive photo editor in a 14 MB download. It runs on any Windows PC (XP through Win 10) and it does not require installation. Feel free to run it from a USB stick, SD card, or portable drive.
PhotoDemon is open-source and available under a permissive BSD license. Contributors have translated the program into more than twenty languages.
You can support PhotoDemon's ongoing development through Patreon or with a one-time donation.
New contributions from coders, designers, translators, and enthusiasts are always welcome.
- For information on the latest stable release, visit https://photodemon.org
- To download the program's source code, visit https://github.com/tannerhelland/PhotoDemon
- To download a nightly build of the latest source code, visit https://photodemon.org/download/
No installer is provided or required. Aside from a temporary folder – which you can specify from the Tools > Options menu – PhotoDemon leaves no trace on your hard drive. Many users run PhotoDemon from a USB stick or portable drive.
Complex editing actions can be recorded as macros (similar to Office software). A built-in batch processor lets you apply macros to entire folders of images.
Many open-source photo editors are usability nightmares. PhotoDemon tries not to be. Small touches like real-time effect previews, save/load presets on all tools, unlimited Undo/Redo, "Fade last action", keyboard accelerators, mouse wheel and X-button support, and descriptive icons make it fast and easy to use.
- Extensive file format support, including Adobe Photoshop images (PSD) and all major camera RAW formats
- Color-managed workflow, including full support for embedded ICC profiles
- Non-destructive editing for select features, including resizing, rotation, and common adjustments
- 2D transformations: advanced rescale operators (Sinc, Catmull-Rom, etc), content-aware scaling (seam carving), crop, straighten, shear, zoom
- Adjustment tools: levels, curves, HDR, shadow/highlight recovery, white balance, Wratten filters, and many more
- Filters and effects: perspective correction, edge detection, noise removal, content-aware blur, unsharp masking, green screen, lens diffraction, vignetting, and many more
- More than 200 tools are provided in the current build.
- PhotoDemon isn't designed for operating systems other than Microsoft Windows. A compatibility layer like Wine may allow it to work on OSX, Linux, or BSD systems, but program stability and performance may suffer.
Current nightly builds offer the following improvements over the last stable release:
- Comprehensive support for Adobe Photoshop (PSD) files and their open-source equivalent, OpenRaster (ORA) files
- Comprehensive support for animated PNG and GIF files
- New custom-built PNG engine with a fully integrated color-mangement pipeline; the engine also auto-optimizes PNGs losslessly for maximum file size reductions, with additional options for lossy quantization (similar to pngquant).
- Main UI support for viewing animated images
- New best-in-class gradient tool and gradient editor
- New clone stamp tool
- Main UI now provides a search bar for locating features and tools
- Main UI now provides on-canvas rulers
- New on-canvas measure tool with support for auto-straightening the image
- New Effects > Render menu with Clouds and Fibers tools.
- Macros can now be automatically created from session history
- Many improvements to keyboard navigation
- All-new digital palette features, including import/export support for all major palette file formats (Adobe PhotoShop, PaintShop Pro, Paint.NET, GIMP, JASC)
- Color selector now provides a palette UI mode for selecting colors from a palette file
- Right-side UI panels are now user-resizable
- Improved auto-correct and auto-enhance tools
- Input boxes now support simple math equations
- Selection tools now support locked aspect ratios for easier cropping
- New Layer > Split menu for automatically splitting layers into individual images, or merging separate images into a single layered image
- Disk I/O tasks have been moved to a new memory-mapped interface, improving performance when e.g. loading/saving image files
- Saved presets on all tools can now be edited, deleted, and rearranged from within the tool UI
- Users on stable builds can now invoke PD's internal debug tool, and the debugger will also auto-start (if user preferences allow) when it detects a program crash
- Numerous bug-fixes, memory reductions, and performance improvements
For a full list of changes, please consult the commit log.
PhotoDemon is primarily supported by an ongoing Patreon campaign. Donating through Patreon comes with extra benefits, like monthly tutorials and updates on new PhotoDemon features, and an interactive area where you can submit feature requests. To learn more, visit PhotoDemon’s Patreon page:
PhotoDemon's lone developer is also extremely grateful for one-time donations. A secure donation page is available at photodemon.org/donate. Thank you!
If you are interested in contributing in other ways (language translations, bug reports, pull requests, etc), please create a new issue at GitHub. A full list of (wonderful!) contributors is available in AUTHORS.md.
PhotoDemon is BSD-licensed. This allows you to use its source code in any application, commercial or otherwise, if you supply proper attribution. Proper attribution includes a notice of copyright and disclaimer of warranty.
PhotoDemon uses some 3rd-party open-source libraries. These libraries are found in the /App/PhotoDemon/Plugins folder. These libraries have their own licenses, separate from PhotoDemon.
Full licensing details are available in LICENSE.md.