Paintbrush

Paintbrush is a simple paint program for Mac OS X, reminiscent of Microsoft Paint and Apple’s own now-defunct MacPaint. It provides users with a means to make simple images quickly, something which has been noticeably absent from the Mac for years.

When Apple released the original Macintosh in 1984, they included two applications: MacWrite and MacPaint. Twenty-five years later, every Mac still includes a basic text editor in TextEdit, but a simple paint program is a thing of the past.

Paintbrush can open and save to most major image formats, including BMP, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and GIF. Full support for transparency is available for image formats which support an alpha channel (currently PNGs and GIFs). You can also paste images copied from many common Mac applications, including Microsoft Office and Apple iWork.

Features are

• An updated and streamlined new UI
• Marching ants for the selection tool
• A completely rewritten Text tool for pinpoint-accurate insertion
• Four all-new tools: Airbrush, Rounded Rectangle, Eyedropper, and Zoom
• Image resizing, canvas resizing, and cropping
• Countless bug fixes and efficiency improvements

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PNG Reference Library: libpng

This is an open source project to develop and maintain the reference library for use in applications that read, create, and manipulate PNG (Portable Network Graphics) raster image files.

Updates

• UPDATE 10 September 2009: The latest released versions are libpng-1.0.50 and libpng-1.2.40.
• UPDATE 10 November 2009: The latest development versions are libpng-1.2.41beta17 and libpng-1.4.0beta95. Both add macros to detect various deprecated usage such as direct reference to members of png_struct and info_struct, and make those new macros configurable. Unless bugs are discovered, these will be the last betas before the "rc" releases.
• UPDATE 31 March 2009 A "git" repository for libpng has been developed.

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Tux Paint

Tux Paint is a free, award-winning drawing program for children ages 3 to 12 (for example, preschool and K-6). It combines an easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who guides children as they use the program.

Kids are presented with a blank canvas and a variety of drawing tools to help them be creative.

Features

• A number of useful drawing tools are made available.
• The drawing canvas is a fixed size, so the user doesn't need to worry about 'pixels' or 'inches' when making a new picture.
• The entire program fits on a screen as small as 640x480, and can be displayed full-screen, to hide the computer's underlying 'desktop' interface. (It defaults to 800x600 mode, but can run at larger sizes and in portrait or landscape mode, as well.)
• Loading and saving of images is done using thumbnails, so no knowledge of the underlying operating system's filesystem structure is needed. Even filenames are unnecessary.
• Fun sound effects are played when tools are selected and used.
• A cartoon version of Tux, the Linux penguin, appears at the bottom to give tips, hints and information.
• Various brushes available
• Parents/teachers can add more brushes
• Brushes can be animated
• Brushes can change shape depending on the direction they're drawn
• Alternate color palettes can be created and used
• Hundreds of photographic and cartoon stamps images are available
• Parents/teachers can add more stamps and create categories
• Stamps can have descriptive text and sound samples (names, facts, etc.) and/or sound effects assigned to them
• Stamps can be resized, flipped and mirrored
• Raster bitmaps (Portable Network Graphics ("PNG")) with full-color and alpha transparency (32bpp RGBA) supported
• Vector graphics (Scalable Vector Graphics ("SVG")) supported
• Line tool
• Shape tool
• Text and Label tools
• 'Magic' (special effects) tool
• Eraser

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GIMP

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.

It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc.

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

GIMP is written and developed under X11 on UNIX platforms. But basically the same code also runs on MS Windows and Mac OS X.

Features and Capabilities

This is only a very quickly thrown together list of GIMP features. You can also have a look at the illustrated features overview.

Painting

o Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
o Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
o Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
o Supports custom brushes and patterns

System
o Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
o Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time

Advanced Manipulation
o Full alpha channel support
o Layers and channels
o Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
o Editable text layers
o Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
o Selection tools including rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy
o Foreground extraction tool
o Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
o Transformable paths, transformable selections.
o Quickmask to paint a selection.

Extensible
o A Procedural Database for calling internal GIMP functions from external programs as in Script-fu
o Advanced scripting capabilities (Scheme, Python, Perl)
o Plug-ins which allow for the easy addition of new file formats and new effect filters
o Over 100 plug-ins already available

Animation
o Load and save animations in a convenient frame-as-layer format
o MNG support
o Frame Navigator (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
o Onion Skin (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)
o Bluebox (in GAP, the GIMP Animation Package)

File Handling
o File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
o Load, display, convert, save to many file formats
o SVG path import/export

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