Dither and Pro Software for Windows

Palette Express
$39 - RI Soft Systems

Create a single, highly optimized palette based upon the various palettes used in multiple images. Using advanced, high speed techniques, Palette Express can search through hundreds of images (and optionally include all subdirectories) and compile a common, optimized color palette. Also use it to dither images to smaller palettes in order to reduce files sizes, without degrading image quality. Save an optimized palette to one of several popular file formats, for compatibility with leading image and photo processing applications (eg. PhotoShop, PaintShop Pro). Or, Palette Express can directly apply the new palette to each of the target images using its sophisticated, built-in dithering techniques. Palette Express can also take an exising palette file (generated by another image tool), or a palette from another image, and apply it to a series of images.

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PaletteMaker
$80 - ITB CompuPhase

PaletteMaker creates a common 256-colour palette from a list of RGB pictures. It uses an iterative and interactive procedure in order to optimize those colours that you judge most important. PaletteMaker is flexible and achieves high quality. PaletteMaker knows about the peculiarities of the Windows Palette Manager and takes the human perception model into account. PaletteMaker combines palette generation with dithering in a way that optimizes the palette for the presence of dither.

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PixTwix
$75 - Softuarium

PixTwix is an image processing library. Designed to work with standard components such as PictureBox or TImage, it features over 150 methods. Our main design goals were flexibility, power and ease of use. With only a few lines of code PixTwix can add following functions to your application: antialiasing, box, radial and tangential blurs, low pass, resampling and softening filters, eroded, faded, or irregular border, framing, painting on canvas, copying entire image or selection to clipboard, pasting clipboard content as new image or into existing image, masked copy and paste operations, color reduction by thresholding or dithering, grayscale conversion, posterization, color replacement and filling, color gradient, threshold, embossing in user-defined direction, image encryption and decryption, intensity range compression, flipping, reflecting, reversing, colorizing, tinting, brightness, contrast, gamma, saturation adjustment, color counting, file checksum calculation, histogram functions, cropping, auto-cropping, resizing, selection masking, intensity range extraction, color clamping (red eye removal), channel mixing or swapping, RGB adjustment, perspective adjustments, skewing, loss-less and lossy rotation with and without clipping, point, ellipse, rectangle, polygon, intensity range and magic wand selection, edge enhancement, high pass and sharpening filters, layer blending, blur, brightness, saturation and contrast gradients, user defined convolution filters, logical operations, minimum and maximum filters, rectangular and concentric mosaics, column and row shearing, sepia toning, solarization, Laplace, Sobel and other special filters, twisting, twirling, scrambling, tiling, range of special effects such as oil painting, blobs, fish eye, explode, wind, unlimited levels of file based undo. Using included FreeImage library PixTwix supports many popular image file formats such as BMP, GIF, IFF, JNG, JPG, LBM, MNG, PBM, PCD, PCX, PNG, PSD, TGA, TIF, WBMP, and more.

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Pro Motion
$78 - cosmigo

Pro Motion is a bitmap editor and animation package, ideal for creating pixel precise animations, images or icons used in games or Flash applications especially for handheld systems like mobile phones,gameboy,PDA,Pocket PC and similar. It has a huge number of functions ranging from simple drawing over color cycling to onion skinning. Use it to create precise and clean images on pixel level for application, game or web design. An excerpt of Pro Motion features: - includes support functions for Gameboy tile graphics - enables you to draw level maps using automatic tile completion (a modification applied to a single tile is autom. copied to all equal tiles within the image) - tons of tools including color cycling, onion skinning, masking, symmetry paint, magic wand, tile painting for "infinite" textures-bitmaps and "standard" functions like line, curve, box, circle, fill (pattern, gradients) - lots of helpful animation functions like append, save as frames, create animation out of single images, transition effects (i.e. fading, dissolve), 3d-keyframer - flexible color palette management with gradients, color remapping/resampling, color reduction (including dithering), RGB channels can have different bit depths (i.e. 3-3-2 or 5-6-5 etc.); HSB/C-scale for selected color ranges - supports GIF(rw),FLI(r), FLC(rw), PNG(rw), TGA(rw), IFF/LBM(rw), ANIM5(r), PCX(rw), CUT(rw), BMP(rw), ANI (animated cursors up to 256 colors rw), ICO (up to 256 colors rw), AVI(rw), JPG(rw) - almost all keyboard shortcuts can be freely defined. - create animations from single images - supports AnimStrips - light table with alpha transparency This program can also be used to create light weight images/animations to beincluded with Macromedia Flash or GIF89a animations for the web.

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Zoner GIF Animator
$29 - Zoner, Inc.

Zoner GIF Animator 5 is an extraordinary tool for creating and editing images, especially Web banners, in the animated GIF format.
The new version 5 provides unique tools for directly creating "trick banners" (animated GIFs with simulated Windows controls), without using another graphics application. Trick banners generally have the highest click-through rate.
Other new features/abilities in version 5: adding vector graphics (e. g. clip art) in the WMF and EMF formats "rendering" (restoring) animations' original frame states, a texture generator, support for Adobe Plug-Ins, a transformation tool for rotating and resizing frames and trimming bitmaps, the option to give frames a solid (alpha) transparency of 0-99%, and an improved algorithm for optimizing animations (minimizing their file size).
Other abilities and features: support for text frames, including advanced editing functions, merging frames, "tweening" (blending) between frames, frame drag-and-drop, support for all frame-refresh methods, titles for all animation frames, easy definition of animation borders, lockable borders, frame printing, frame rotation and flipping, creating empty bitmap frames, distortion effect, export of individual frames to bitmaps.
Bitmap import: GIF, JPG, PCD, MAC, PNG, TIF, TGA, BMP, DIB, RLE, ICO, WPG, BMI, and PCX, animation import: FLI, FLIC, and AVI.
"Optimization" commands -- to minimize animations' file sizes: dither frames, trim frames, remove comment blocks, remove titles, remove special features (convert vector graphics, TrueColor bitmaps, and simulated controls into the ordinary bitmaps used in aGIF frames), use difference method, create global and/or local palettes, and set palettes' color depth precisely.

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SecureSafe Pro
$32 - WinCatalog.com

If you are having problems remembering all your access passwords and logins, would like to protect yourself against identity theft and need a reliable software solution to store files with confidential information in one place safely and securely, you need to get SecureSafe Pro. Sure, it may sound like a sales push, but you'll change your mind once you try it. After all, great software sells itself. And here is why:

First, SecureSafe Pro is 100% free to download and try. Second, it uses a military-grade encryption standard approved and used by the US Department of Defense (namely AES, Advanced Encryption Standard with 256-bit key). Third, it frees you from having to remember all of your passwords and logins. They are stored in a database tree, which is very easy to search and navigate.

When you visit a site, simply click the SecureSafe Pro icon conveniently located in the system tray, enter your access password and that's it. Never check "Remember my login and password" box on websites, since this is not safe and may lead to hackers getting access to your private information, or worse yet - stealing your identity. Use SecureSafe Pro instead.

The program also includes a number of safety precautions, such as the unloading of access data if the program is left idle, and a "tough password generator" feature.

This program is not just another password keeper. You can store regular files inside the program. The program can store any file and all files can be launched from SecureSafe Pro. The files stored with SecureSafe Pro won't be visible and accessible to anybody but you. There are no limits to how many entries you can store and the program is incredibly easy to use.

If you find any solution that works better than SecureSafe Pro, let us know. But since such a program has not yet been released, we suggest you take advantage of your free SecureSafe Pro test drive.

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