Image and Photo Manipulation Software
rev. 9-10-2010
To assist AMC members that might want to submit photos but are having difficulty in
manipulating their digital photos, here is a little discussion on
programs that I have used and might be suitable for others to try
out. These software programs might be useful to those that are
currently using some other method and would like to compare their
current method with the ones that I find useful. (These are Windows systems only. If Mac users have favorite comparable programs, contact the webmaster)
- The image viewer and editor that I have been using
for many years and is still my favorite is ACDSee.
This is an old program that has been around many years and is an
established favorite. I currently use version 4 and version 7.
Version 4 is half the size of version 7 and is much quicker loading.
It has all the features that I need. Version 7 has easier to use
cropping and editing tools, but the final results are pretty much
the same as version 4. Unfortunately version 4 is not available. The
current version offered is version 12. It is a 60 meg download and
the purchase price is $70. They offer a free 30 trial version.. If
you do a lot of photo manipulation I think the program is worth the
price.
- For those that do not wish to purchase software, there are free (for
non-commercial use) programs available that will do most of the
manipulations that the commercial software will do. But there is no
such thing as a free “full” lunch, but there are free
“light” lunches out there. After downloading many of the
popular free programs and looking at them from the standpoint of
ease of use, intuitive controls, and being able to do simple
manipulation on groups of files, here are my recommendations.
- Picasa
is a commonly used photo program offered by Google. It seems to do
everything, but in the process ends up being a huge program that
probably does more than you want. If you have a lot of photos on
your computer, it will go through and index all the photos as
thumbnails, including videos. It is a free Google program and they
are an advertising venue. Built in features such as emailing
photos, creating Gmail or Web Albums accounts, are all geared to
acquiring you as a consumer. Like all Google applications it is a
professional type program that requires you to take time and look
over carefully to see if all or any of the features are useful to
your requirements. I personally do not use it, preferring to use
less complex tools. One of the features that is handy is the
ability to create a simple webpage for photos with thumbnails. The
final result is similar to the one that I use on the Narragansett
Chapter website Photo Album pages, derived (but edited for specific
committees) from the free program Xnview.
- FastStone
Image Viewer has most of the features needed for manipulating
your photos, including adjusting contrast, gamma, light table
sorting, renaming, etc. It also does image rotation and resizing
(but not batch). These are the most used and needed features, since
most digital cameras take huge 1-3 megabyte images, and people
rotate their cameras often for vertical photos. FastStone also has a
separate
image resizing program which is quite complete on all the
features. Probably a little more than the average user needs, but
between these two programs, you can do almost anything needed with
digital images. They also have a easy screen
capture program ($). All these program can be downloaded from
the FastStone home site.
- For a small really easy program to just resize
photos to a suitable size for submitting to the AMC, you can not
beat “resize.exe”. It is a stand alone program ( does
not need the usual installation into Windows), is only 338K bytes,
and has the four most important controls. It can do blocks of
images, it allows control of the jpeg quality, it allows you to
select a destination folder, and it has a built in image viewer. Get
the program from this
download site. You will have to unzip the file. Put the program
anywhere and make a shortcut for your desktop. That is all that is
needed. It can only do bmp and jpeg photos, not gif or png, or any
of the other many formats. But most digital cameras output jpeg
photos. Note that this program will not rotate those vertical
photos.