Alchemy Mindworks

The Windows Defender application that installs with Windows 10 is an estimable security application, with a rigorously-maintained database of threats. That it costs nothing to use has a lot to be said for it as well. Like most security software, however, it likes to wander into the insanely-paranoid section of the theater from time to time.

Left to its own devices, Windows Defender will avail your computer of a laudable degree of protection from malware and other intrusions by cybercretins. It can also substantially reduce the usefulness of the system it’s running on.

One of the more questionable features of Windows Defender is its real time protection. Real time protection scans every file that arrives on your computer – in real time, as its name implies – to defend you against invading e-mail attachments, venomous downloads and malicious web browser plugins, among many other things.

Continue reading ‘Windows Speedup: Disabling Defender’s Real Time Protection’ »

Earlier releases of Windows – most notably the much-beloved Windows XP, now something of a fond memory – included the elegantly simple and occasionally berated Windows Paint application. For the most part, it was about as useful as a left-leaning politician in a riding with absolutely no bribable voters – but there were situations in which its childlike simplicity and twentieth-century dearth of features made it the ideal software for manipulating a few pixels.

By comparison, Windows Paint under Windows 7 and Windows 8 resembles the drooling idiot offspring of a cheap date in which neither participant was demonstrably human. It’s just sophisticated enough to allow its imperfect antialiasing, questionable drawing tools and counter-intuitive user interface to get in the way.

Long-time users of Paint from a bygone era can often be heard mourning its loss.

Continue reading ‘Classic Windows Paint for Windows 7 and Windows 8’ »

The process of installing updates to Alchemy Mindworks’ version 4 applications is somewhat more involved than was the case for their ancestors. While doing so will unquestionably entail more clicking than users of our products may be used to – for which we’re suitably contrite – you can minimize the additional work required if you understand what the little man behind the curtain is up to.

Earlier releases of our software used a custom installer that we wrote, and as such, that we were able to nuance into being a fairly effortless installation experience. It was typically done with an installation so quickly as to make describing its activities as an “experience” just this side of pretentious.

Continue reading ‘Version 4 Updates in 30 Seconds’ »

Many of the Alchemy Mindworks applications – including GIF Construction Set Professional, Graphic Workshop Professional, Animation Workshop, PNG/MNG Construction Set and Presentation Wizard – have internal Paint functions that call Windows Paint. At least, they do if it’s been installed.

Should you click on Paint in one of our applications and discover that nothing much happens – or if the application hangs – you’re probably looking at a total absence of the Windows Paint application.

Continue reading ‘Quest for the Missing Paint’ »

Web page frames having clean rounded corners are fashionable at the moment. While you can arrive at them with considerable work using conventional tools, you can create them effortlessly using Graphic Workshop Professional 3. Most of the tricky aspects of getting all the pixels in these complex web objects to line up correctly fade to inconsequence once you have the procedure by the throat.

Continue reading ‘The Art of the Round Corner Box’ »

Attaching images consecutively – with a second graphic stitched to the bottom or one side of a first – is easy in Graphic Workshop, even if Graphic Workshop doesn’t strictly speaking have a function to do it. This “by hand” approach to the problem will allow you to fine-tune the results, and manually adjust the relative dimensions of the pictures involved if you need to.

Continue reading ‘Easy Image Stitching in Graphic Workshop Professional’ »

One of the most mature applications on Earth, Graphic Workshop Professional can trace its ancestry back to 1986. It predates the Internet, iPods, digital cell phones and the births of a considerable portion of its current users.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it has acquired a considerable wealth of functionality in over two decades – so much so that almost nobody who uses it uses all of it.

Continue reading ‘Ten Features of Graphic Workshop Almost Nobody Knows About’ »

Digital cameras – real ones, not the cameras that also place phone calls – embody a level of sophistication that makes even the best old-style film cameras look like cave painting. This having been said, they’re nowhere near as smart as the people who buy them. Human beings have much more sophisticated image processing software in their brains than any digital camera can aspire to.

You can usually improve the appearance of your digital photographs by switching on your image processing software, and then booting up ours. Graphic Workshop Professional‘s rich library of interactive image processing filters can give your pictures the subtlety and refinement of professional photography without requiring that you put up with a balding forty-something auteur who keeps saying “give it to me” and waving his hands incoherently.

Continue reading ‘Ten Graphic Workshop Filters to Improve Your Digital Photographs’ »

Graphic Workshop Professional‘s numerous thumbnail modes can be a bit overwhelming when you first boot up the software, or if you enable one of the more obscure ones accidentally and you subsequently can’t remember how to turn the beast off.

Continue reading ‘Graphic Workshop Thumbnail Options’ »