Hornil StylePix 2.0.3.0

Overview

Hornil StylePix is free feature-rich image editing software designed to help users enhance the quality of their photos You can add shapes, text messages, apply various cool effects. It is a light and rather useful tool for anyone who wants to protect his digital work. A photographer can protect his photos by adding text message to the image, as well as a writer, can create an image of his text file and add text watermarking his copyright. Overall, number of elaborate operations this nifty tool allows is great. This is a reliable and free alternative to expensive image editors, like Photoshop. Hornil StylePix comes with a plethora of advanced features. All you need is to dedicate some time to studying them.

Installation

Hornil StylePix is a lightweight application that installs in sandbox painlessly. It requires 133MHz or faster processor, 512MB RAM, 10MB of available hard-disk space, 1024x768 Resolution. It is compatible with all Windows OS, including Win 8.

Interface

The application offers an intuitive interface that is more functional than beautiful. This is understandable due to the number of features you need to master and navigate. There is a dozen of handy tools, which are self-evident in their functions.

Features

• Support for png, jpg, bmp, tif, gif, tga file formats.
• Possibility to work with multiple files simultaneously.
• Full-screen view Guides, rulers, grid support View histogram, thumbnail and waveform for the current image.
• Editing tools from auto-range to lasso and transformation options.
• Drawing tools from brush to circles and multi-line text embedding.
• 20 blending modes.
• Gradient fill support.
• HSV color picker.
• Batch processing includes renaming, filtering, resizing.
• Restore and enhancement tools are over 30.
• Adjust color, sharpness, brightness, sharpness.
• Apply mosaic, noise, style and other filters.
• Support for multi-layer and group editing.
• Support for blending modes.

Pros

• Hornil StylePix is lightweight and undemanding on system resources.
• It works fast and does not affect other program’s performance.
• Abundance of advanced tool for image editing.
• Availability of transformation options to rotate, scale, skew, distort the perspective.
• Wide variety of drawing tools, filters and layer support.
• Images can be saved to many file formats.

Cons

• No watermarking feature.
• No snapshot/screenshot import feature.

Alternatives

Hornil StylePix is close to Photoshop in features, but the latter comes at a substantial price and has a steep learning curve. Speedy Painter is an OpenGL based painting software that supports Wacom digitizers to vary the size and opacity of brush strokes according to pen pressure. MyPaint a fast and easy open-source graphics application for digital painters. Corel Paint Shop Pro is a graphics and photos editor, comes as Shareware. Run Painter Run is a Windows freeware for digital painters; compatible with Windows 98/Me/NT/2000/XP/2003.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that Hornil StylePix is a powerful and free alternative to Photoshop. It offers an attractive and intuitive GUI allowing users start editing and enhancing their photos on the go. Newcomers to image editing will spend some time learning the features of this capable software, but considering the fact that it is a free fully-fledged image editing application, the time spent learning is well worth the effort.