PhotoDemon provides a comprehensive photo editor in an 20 MB download. It runs on any Windows PC (XP through Win 11) and it does not require installation. You can run it from a USB stick, SD card, or portable drive.

PhotoDemon is open-source and available under a permissive BSD license. Contributors have translated the program into more than a dozen languages.

Features

Lightweight and completely portable

No installer is provided or required. Aside from a temporary folder – which you can specify in the Tools > Options menu – PhotoDemon leaves no trace on your hard drive. Many users run PhotoDemon from a USB stick or microSD card.

Integrated macro recording and batch processing

Complex editing actions can be recorded as macros (similar to Office software). A built-in batch processor lets you apply macros to entire folders of images.

Usability is paramount

Many open-source photo editors are usability nightmares. PhotoDemon tries not to be. Small touches like real-time effect previews, save/load presets on all tools, unlimited Undo/Redo, customizable hotkeys, mouse wheel and X-button support, and descriptive icons make it fast and easy to use.

Power

The current build provides more than 200 professional-grade tools, including layers, selection tools and digital paintbrushes, content-aware fill and resize, shadow/highlight recovery, perspective and lens correction, and expansive support for image files from other software, including Adobe Photoshop (PSD), Corel Paintshop Pro (PSP), and GIMP (XCF).

Pro-grade features and tools

  • Extensive file format support, including Adobe Photoshop (PSD), Corel PaintShop Pro (PSP), GIMP (XCF), and major camera RAW formats
  • Advanced multi-layer support, including editable text layers and non-destructive layer modifications
  • Color-managed workflow, including support for embedded ICC profiles
  • On-canvas tools: digital paintbrushes, clone and pattern brushes, advanced selection tools, interactive gradients, and more
  • Adjustment tools: levels, curves, HDR, shadow/highlight recovery, white balance, and many more
  • Filters and effects: perspective correction, edge enhancement, noise removal, content-aware fill and resize, unsharp masking, gradient and palette mapping, and many more
  • More than 200 tools are provided in the current build.

What's New

File formats

  • This release includes major updates for a few different file formats.

Overhauled JPEG-2000 support

  • PhotoDemon now ships with the OpenJPEG library for greatly expanded and improved JPEG-2000 support. JPEG-2000 images load up to 10x faster than previous builds, broken JP2 images can now (often) be recovered, memory usage when importing/exporting JP2 images is way down, and a ton of JP2-related bugs and compatibility failures have finally been resolved.
  • After aggressively testing PhotoDemon's JPEG-2000 implementation against the official OpenJPEG image conformance suite, I feel confident stating that PD provides more comprehensive JPEG-2000 coverage than any other open-source photo editor. Here are some of my developer notes from the main JP2 compatibility commit:
  • Grayscale, RGB/A, and YUV/A color formats are all supported.
  • Images tagged as "unknown" are now imported successfully in most cases (using heuristics to "guess" how to treat the image data).
  • Per-channel subsampling is now supported.
  • All color-depths (called "precisions" in JP2 parlance) are now supported.
  • Signed color definitions are now supported.
  • Many improvements have been made to import performance, and load time of large JPEG-2000 images is often reduced 90+% vs previous releases.
  • Embedded ICC profiles (color management) are now supported.
  • "Broken" or partially-broken JP2 images can often be largely recovered by the new import process.
  • Unicode filenames and paths are now supported.
  • Mislabeled JP2 files (bad file extensions) are now properly identified, and we'll offer to fix.
  • Images that exceed 32-bit memory limits can now be auto-downsized and imported into PD at a workable fraction of their original size.
  • Weird edge-case behavior with nonstandard subsampling, color handling, and other quirky states has been overhauled to match OpenJPEG's reference library behavior wherever possible. This means PD now produces identical results in conformance suite handling to OpenJPEG's reference handler.
  • Thank you to everyone who submitted JPEG-2000-related bug reports in previous builds. Your comments helped motivate this overhaul!

New DDS (DirectDraw Surface) support

  • The good news: PhotoDemon now uses the excellent DirectXTex library for DDS import and export. This brings huge compatibilty improvements, and PD should now successfully handle almost every variety of the (very complex) DDS format. For the first time, PhotoDemon can also export DDS images.
  • The bad news: like many modern tools, DirectXTex is only compatible with 64-bit operating systems. PhotoDemon automatically handles interoperability for you, but full DDS support will only be activated on 64-bit systems.

PNG coverage for the new 2025 specification update

  • In 2025, the W3C officially endorsed an updated PNG specification. This specification formalized some popular-but-unofficial-features (like animated PNGs, which PhotoDemon has supported for years). But it also included a few new features, like color space chunks for modern HDR data.
  • PhotoDemon's PNG engine now supports these new features, making it one of the first open-source photo editors compatible with these updates. This update also ensures that PNG images continue to look the same in PD as they do in your web browser.

Other file format improvements

  • Updates to relevant 3rd-party libraries bring improved coverage for WebP, HEIF/HEIC, and PDF files. Coverage and bug-fixes for BMP-format images has also improved.

Front-end improvements

  • New Image > Show in file manager menu
  • New user preference to toggle automatic activate Move tool after paste
  • 150% zoom is now available on the main viewport
  • New option to reset all "remember my choice" options
  • New View > Center image in viewport menu
  • New default hotkeys for rotate image left/right (Ctrl+[ and Ctrl+], respectively)
  • Improved tracking for custom hotkey combinations
  • Crop tool: ENTER and ESC hotkeys are now enabled for committing or clearing the active crop
  • The 3rd-party libraries dialog has been hardened to prevent click-happy users from accidentally disabling essential libraries.

Back-end improvements

  • Critical bug-fixes for users in Taiwanese and other Traditional Chinese language locales. A huge shout-out and thank-you to 笙歌 for their help with this!
  • Ongoing improvements to XP and Windows 7 compatibility, particularly regarding 3rd-party library behavior.
  • A number of bug-fixes for high-DPI displays
  • Improved program shutdown performance
  • Corrupt preferences files can now (usually) be detected and silently reset, preventing crashes on subsequent sessions if you yank out PhotoDemon's USB drive without safely ejecting it.
  • Fixes for Unicode captions not displaying correctly in some esoteric dialogs
  • Fixes for the main window's caption not diplaying changed file formats correctly after a File > Save As operation.