By Nick Peers
Kenyan coder John Paul Chacha has made his Chasys Draw IES image suite completely free with its latest release, creating a rival to other popular free image-editing tools such as Paint.NET and The GIMP. Chasys Draw IES consists of four components, the main being Chasys Draw Artist, a full image editor with powerful feature set. There's also an image viewer (Chasys Draw Viewer), batch conversion tool (Chasys Draw Converter) and tool for processing RAW digital camera image files (Chasys Draw raw-Photo).
Chasys Draw Artist is a fully functional image editor, with a powerful set of features to rival both commercial and other free applications. It promises a radically different approach to image editing, and is also capable of creating images, icons, CD labels and other useful designs.
Version 3.60 was the first freeware release for the program, which previously cost $35. It introduced a redesigned batch conversion tool offering improved performance and features, such as the ability to duplicate sub-folder hierarchies. It added a new effect to the Artist program -- Diffuse Glow, introduced multi-page document support in Viewer and tweaked the user interface for all applications. Subsequent 3.60.02 and now 3.60.03 builds were minor bug fixes, resolving a problem saving in certain formats (including GIF) and fixing a bug with the installer.
Chasys Draw IES is freeware, and runs on PCs running Windows 2000 or later, with 512MB RAM, 550MB hard drive space and a 1280x1024 display.
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