The official Lumion list of image editing applications

Screenshot of Pixlr.

Please note: Act-3D B.V. does not imply any warranty or recommendation of the following applications.

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1. Image editing applications

• Adobe Photoshop
• Affinity Photo: Adobe Photoshop compatible. Receiving some acclaims. Developed by Serif that previously made Serif PhotoPlus and other graphics creatives tools.
• Gimp
• Corel PhotoPaint or Paintshop Pro
• Pixlr: Free online Adobe Photoshop alternative. Very similar to Adobe Photoshop. No restrictions.
• Photopea: Free, online browser-based alternative to Adobe Photoshop.
• SumoPaint: Free Adobe Photoshop alternative. Another online editor with cool tools and features.
• Autodesk SketchBook: Free, unrestricted version.
• AVS Image and Video Tools
• Krita: Krita is a professional free and open source painting program.
• Shiftn: App for automatic correction of converging lines.
• Topaz: Various image editing effects.
• Foto Sketcher: Free app that can convert photos to drawings, watercolor paintings etc.

2. Image rescalers

• SmillaEnlarger: SmillaEnlarger is a small graphical tool ( based on Qt ) to resize, especially magnify bitmaps in high quality. It seems to scale up well to much bigger resolutions without pixelation. No further development on it though since 2012.
• BenVista PhotoZoom Pro (or standard). Commercial but cheap and recently updated. Extreme enlargements: up to 1 million by 1 million pixels!. This, as far as we know, is based on the original technique in Smilla Enlarger. Also available at Ashampoo, but not the Pro version.
• Topaz: A.I. Gigapixel: Enlarge images up to 600% using A.I. upsampling. Not free, commercial version, and trial from the web site.

3. Vector drawing

• Inkscaper: Adobe Illustrator alternative.
• Affinity Designer: Adobe Illustrator compatible. Receiving some acclaims. Developed by Serif that previously made Serif PhotoPlus and other graphics creatives tools.

4. Texture making

• Adobe: Substance Designer
• Genetica by Spiralgraphics
• Filter Forge: Similar to Spiralgraphics' Genetica. Node-based editor, controls, outputs maps, tiles perfectly.
• Neo Texture Edit
• Intel® Texture Works Plugin for Photoshop: The plugin includes working with the newest BC/DXT GPU compression method for 'DDS' textures.
• Materialize: Materialize is a stand-alone tool for creating materials for use in games from images. Open source.

5. Normal Map creators (may also include Displacement and Specular Maps)
These texture types can be used in Standard materials for adding depth/details to textures. There's more information in this article:

• Knowledge Base: What do the properties of the Standard Material mean in Lumion 10 and newer versions?
  
  
• ShaderMap: App (not free).
• Quixel: Scan-based PBR texturing (not free).
• Smart Normal: Free online service.
• NormalMap Online: Free online service.
• Photoshop scripts: Free scripts for Photoshop.
• Awesome Bump: Free app.
• MindTex 2: Not free.
• CrazyBump: Not free.
• Materialize: fee open-source.

6. Tracing overlays for photo-matching

• Image Overlay Utility: Virtual tracing paper. A small Windows program for displaying transparent, click-through images anywhere on-screen.
• Ghost-It!: runs in the system tray, and lets you turn windows into ghost windows.
• Glass2k: Glass2k is an older application originally designed for Windows XP, but it worked perfectly for us in Windows 10. By default, if you right-click on any Window, you can quickly change the transparency from 10 percent to 90 percent.
• GhostWin (not tested): GhostWin allows you to make any application window slightly or completely transparent, and automatically adjusts the transparency level of windows that are being moved or sized so you can see what's underneath them ahead of time.
• OnTopReplica: This simple utility application shows a blank always-on-top window by default.

7. Color Pickers:

• Instant Eye Dropper: A free color detection tool for webmasters and others that will identify and automatically paste to the clipboard the HTML color code of any pixel on the screen with just a single mouse click

8. Caustics:

• Caustics Generator: The patterns rendered by this program are calculated by simulating the effect of light refracting through water. Commercial
• Substance Designer Tools - Caustics Generator : A Substance Designer plugin tool that generates an animated caustics pattern, with several parameters to control the output. Includes source files. Free.
• Caustics Generator 1.41: Caustics can be described as the light pattern you see at the bottom of a pool on a sunny day. This tool will let you render such caustics patterns. Free software under GNU GPL.