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Toy Viewer's only drawback is its lack of speed.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T h e   R o a d   L e s s   T r a v e l e d
Misnamed 'Toy Viewer' is a surprising image program, and the price is cool, too


Dec. 15, 2004


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard

   Photoshop, the Rolls Royce of image editors, costs $600 even at discount. Even its little brother, Photoshop Elements 3.0, sells for about $100. With these prices in mind, you might wonder if you've seen a misprint when I tell you the cost of a new image editor for OS X that makes Photoshop look old fashioned.
   How about $900? Would you pay that much?
   I hope not. Because the new software that captured my fancy doesn't cost $900 or even $90. It can be had for nothing at all. It's free, as in no-cost, spelled "$0.00." And it's both easy to use and extraordinarily powerful.
   Don't let the name of this new whiz-bang program fool you. It's called Toy Viewer, from Japanese programmer Takeshi Ogihara, at http://waltz.cs.scitec.kobe-u.ac.jp. To the Japanese, "toy" doesn't mean something from Tonka. It's a word the Japanese have incorporated into their own tech-talk as a synonym for "cool."
   And "cool" is just what it is. I've never been so impressed with a freeware image editor. As the name indicates, Toy Viewer is also a superb image-display program, too, able to show practically any image format you'll ever come across. Here's a partial list: tiff, gif, bmp, png, jpg, bie (jbig), pcx, pcd, pict, pnm (ppm, pbm, or pgm), xbm, mag, SUN Rasterfile and JPEG2000 (jp2, jpc, j2k).
   But the editing and processing functions in Toy Viewer are breathtaking. The programmer almost guarantees that you will never ruin a photo, too; every time you perform an editing or processing step, Toy Viewer creates a new version of the image showing your changes. You are never editing the original.
   Some of Toy Viewer's functions are more or less standard. You can crop an image -- as I point out above, when you crop a picture you are actually creating a new image, so you simply click "Open pasteboard" in the File menu to create the cropped image -- and you can adjust color, brightness and sharpness, too. You can make images blurry instead of sharp, if you like, and you can create some beautiful color images by reducing the color bit-plane setting (under "Color Reduction").
   You can also make the lighter areas of images transparent -- a stunning effect the first time you experiment with it -- and you can get amazing varieties of gray-scale images -- what most people refer to as "black and white" -- in the "Brightness/Monochrome" menu. In that menu's "Steps" option, "Steps" seems to be a bad translation from Japanese; it actually controls the bit-plane setting, or the number of gray levels.
   (I never shot color photos until I was a grownup, so the gray-scale options are a real playground for me. I was easily able to simulate the look of old Polaroid Land photos, for example.)
   A bonus that makes Toy Viewer almost essential for many digital photo enthusiasts is a built-in framing function. You can create seven kinds of borders of any color and width. Borderless images will seem naken after you've become accustomed to the finished (and "proper") look even the most subtle border adds.
   The sole weakness of Toy Viewer is its lack of speed when used strictly as a viewer. It's fine with JPEGs, but images that use complicated compression methods give it a hard time. Some of my largest lossless JPEG2000 images, which I use almost exclusively now, opened farily slowly. An 9-megabyte JPEG2000 image that took seven seconds for ACDSee 1.6 to show full-screen required 37 seconds to open full-screen in Toy Viewer.
   Toy Viewer has many other functions, including a slide-show mode and rotation and negative options. In all, Toy Viewer stands as one of the most valuable image-editing programs I've installed on my OS X Macintosh. The fact that "valuable" can describe a free program is a tribute to the rich choices of no-cost software made possible by the World Wide Web.