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Are there any simple graphic editors?

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rdjw:
Howdy, Forum. first ever post, just joined today.

I am sysadmin for a large and fairly boring document management system, I am responsible for all training design and delivery. I make heavy use of static screen captures as illustrations. Back in the 90s (yeah, I'm old) we had a simple but effective tool to edit static screen graphics, but the company did not survive, and the last release runs on 64 bit OS (Win 7), but it got over-ambitious and became sludgy rather than nimble. Won't run on Win 8 at all.  Sigh. I don't need layers or fancy texturing or "special effects," - just the basic stuff that educators need to make simple, clear, uncluttered images:

*   highlighting
*   foreground, background and transparent color settings.
*   Select and move selections within an image
*   add text
*   add shapes like ovals, circles, rectangles, etc, filled or unfilled.
*   fill a selection with a different color
*   re-size, re-dimension, rotate
*   multiple images open at same time
*   nice but not essential, select similar on a specific color and replace with different color.

and so on. I found some threads here from a few years ago that gave suggestions, but nothing recent. I do not need a photo editor - I have tried paint.net and several others, but are way overly complex. I am just now trying PickPic, which might be as close as I  can get to simple with the features I need.

Does anyone have favorites for this kind of work? I have just installed SSC, which I think is way cool and I love all of Mouser's videos, but SSC does not seem to have the editing features I need.

Edvard:
Welcome to DonationCoder!!

I was going to suggest Paint.net, but you beat me to it.  I have found that anything more advanced than mspaint eventually wants to grow up to be a Photoshop clone, so it may be difficult to find a good editor that likes to stay small and simple.  
That said, I can suggest:

OpenOffice/LibreOffice Draw.
Yes, you have to download the whole suite to use this one component, but it excels at doing the basics; shapes, text, photo resizing and cropping, etc.:
https://www.libreoffice.org/discover/draw/
http://www.openoffice.org/product/draw.html
(never mind the LibreOffice website's 'Modern' look; the software is functionally identical to OpenOffice for the most part)

RealWorld Paint.
Written by our very own forum member Vlastimil:
https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=34402.0
http://www.rw-designer.com/image-editor

Lazpaint.
Actually more of an exercise in programming graphics manipulation with FreePascal/Lazarus, but has pretty good basic functionality:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazpaint/

The only drawback to Open/LibreOffice Draw is the size of the suite, but it will probably work as you intend.
RealWorld Paint and Lazpaint have support for layers, special effects, etc. but not to the extent of advanced editors like Gimp, Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, etc.

Hopefully, you will find one of these to your liking.

rdjw:
Thanks so much! I will try these.

jpfx:
deleted

TaoPhoenix:
Thanks so much! I will try these.
-rdjw (April 28, 2014, 06:10 AM)
--- End quote ---

I'd like to know what you think of Real World Paint. It looks like it can do both your basics and a couple of the fancy things as well! But speaking of Simple, my use case is even more stripped than yours, so Vlastimil experimented with making a toggleable simple interface. One of the main features I discovered in Excel 2010 was a universal toggleable toolbar, so you put your favorite 9 things in a row.

I think he had to make mine by hand, but depending how long it took him and if he's still around he might be able to make you one too.

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