PaintCAD

PaintCAD is a portable graphic editing utility that gives you the possibility to put together GIF animations, 3D photographs, and fonts. It also features video recording and snapshot grabbing via your webcam.

No setup required

Since there is no installation involved, you can drop the program files in any part of the hard drive and just click the executable to launch PaintCAD. Alternatively, you can keep it stored on a removable storage device, in order to directly run it on any computer with minimum effort. Unlike most installers, it doesn't change Windows registry settings.

Interactive interface and options

The GUI is user-friendly and interactive. The main application window contains several drawing tools and shortcuts to PaintCAD's commands, and the buttons have different colors which make it look lively.

Explore and customize drawing tools

You can use a pen, brush, invertor, filler, line, circle, circle filler, frame, frame filler, polyline, triangle and text, as well as explore the color palette's grid, spectral and RGB modes.
It's possible to input the line weight value, use an eyedropper, and apply various effects, such as blur, bevel, gradient, colorizer, contrast, brightness, color and gamma adjustments, extender, 3D stroke, shadow, and glow.
Images can be imported from BMP, GIF and PAL files, as well as exported to PNG, WBMP, ICO and JPG. PaintCAD lets you preview your project in full screen mode, search for pixels, crop and rotate images, create AVI clips from BMP and JPG images, extract frames from video files, and more.

Evaluation and conclusion

We haven't come across any stability issues in our tests, thanks to the fact that the application didn't freeze, crash or prompt error dialogs. It had minimal impact on computer performance, running on low CPU and RAM. On the other hand, PaintCAD is not intuitive and it takes a while to figure out all its options. Otherwise, it sports a pretty rich set of features for a free CAD processing utility.