Articles | Useful Programs & Resources

Here is a small collection of programs or resources I personally use. I don't list anything here unless I myself have used it and therefore curated it. That said due to the volatile nature of the internet I can't guarantee the programs are still up or reliable in the state you find them in.

Waifu2x

Waifu2x was some uni deep learning project with emphasis on de-noising and image upscaling. At the time of this writing AI image upscaling is mostly kneecapped to CUDA and other gross stuff no one wants to willfully associate with, or locked behind a ton of unnecessary middleware like python-based script libraries that work as hard as possible to discourage new users from figuring out what to do just to get to the rescaling images part of the trashfire.

Waifu2x on the other hand is popular enough there's like 69 different websites all claiming to be Waifu2x and they're not. They're typical malware that gets featured by google search results because the only kind of curation google does is of the censorship or political agenda-pushing variety. Most importantly is that it comes with a pre-learned library targeting mostly anime style images, but there's one for photos as well. I haven't tried the photo one since the anime one handles most photorealistic images I handle it pretty favorably. The newer versions are significant improvements from the CPU-based one I used since I started D&D work until recently but it can still cause ringing artifacts on some transparent images.

https://github.com/nihui/waifu2x-ncnn-vulkan - Here's the Vulcan build for Waifu2x, which is the only version 99.99% of users are going to want. No, the website version isn't as good. Yes, you need to use command line. Make a bat file or something.

I don't have the right click menu thing on-hand at the time of this writing (try to get this before publishing) but in essence you can use the program to de-noise, upscale or both. It so far only supports 2x upscaling.

Krita

By furries for furries. If you judge by the logo, anyways. A good alternative to photoshop for anything that doesn't need a lot of filter work and the UI is a bit more friendly for me than SAI. But, as expected, you'll want to keep PS CS 2.0 on hand for stuff you need filters for since Krita's are pretty barebones. However I use it for all pixel-by-pixel transparency, watermark removal, color correction and other image editing work that doesn't call for stuff like complex hue shifts or gradients. Krita can probably do all that stuff but it isn't as straight forward as photoshop and therefore it isn't as good.

Krita will sometimes silently crash on you, even if left idle, but it always makes autosave files so I've rarely lost anything to it. Some parts of image editing are ludicrously slow, like moving pasted images. But actual editing is pretty solid so far. Haven't done much with the tablet on it, so can't comment there (most people using SAI are using it for tablet features).

XNView

Since Microcuck won't add basic image preview functions to Windows and broke the thumbnail cache handling even more in win10 the need for a proper folder browser that can show tga and other thumbnails as well as open things like tga and dds without loading an OS worth of bloat becomes rather dire. This is where XNView comes in. As seen in my edu videos and D&D videos, XNView is an invaluable part of day to day image handling. Just don't expect it to do anything terribly fancy, but hue shifts and other basic edits are quite doable. Doesn't have spline64 resize.

Note to self - hunt down that thing that adds "browse with xnview" to folders.

Audition 1.5

Audition shows its age in many ways, especially with significant instability when serving RX Tools and other middleware, as well as its 32bit memory limit, but it's still so far the uncontested king of audio editing. It's the last tool in the Audition line that still retains any semblance of user friendliness from Cooledit and it still has the most powerful stock filters in the DAW market. It doesn't bug out at the hardware level and chew CPU with hidden services like Apple malware and it has a far more user-friendly ui than Acid, Soundwave, and all other alternatives I've thus far tried.

One day I'll try out Reaper, but I doubt it will dethrone Audition. Vegas is better for multitrack editing by far, though, so I just forget that part of Audition even exists.

Hardest part for you will be finding it since it hasn't been sold for many years.