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I'm impressed with a relative newcomer called Photogenetics.
   technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Dealing with digital images, Part 3: Good image editors you can try for free


Feb. 21, 1999

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, The Syracuse Newspapers

   Last week I wrote about good image viewers for Windows. The best -- ACDSee, Thumbs Plus and Compupic -- can also double as image editors.
   But if you have a lot of digital camera photos or images created by a scanner, you probably need a separate image editor. They don't cost much, and you can try out all the ones I'm recommending for free.
   An image editor, also called a graphics editor or photo editor, lets you crop, resize, brighten, sharpen and copy images. It might have other functions, too. My main interest when I edit images is to improve them, so most extra features (creating mosaics, for example) have no bearing on what I think of the software.
   The king of downloadable image editors is Paint Shop Pro. It's one of the oldest and most respected shareware programs for Windows. It costs $100. (The price seems high, but try it for free before you worry about the cost.) Go to http://www.jasc.com/.
   Paint Shop Pro's only drawback is its name. It's the dumbest name for a smart program I've seen in years. 'Paint' programs have almost nothing in common with Paint Shop Pro. Yes, you can create cute little doodles with it, but it's not a computer "painting" program any more than a BMW is a way to get out of the rain.
   Paint Shop Pro is very powerful and a little quirky, so give yourself time to learn it. One of the best aspects of Paint Shop Pro -- and one reason thousands of professional computer graphics artists love it -- is the way it uses plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop.
   Plug-ins are small helper programs that work with a main program. You might already know that Web browsers have plug-ins, for example.
   There are hundreds and hundreds of plug-ins for Adobe's superb (and very expensive) image editor, Photoshop. They make Photoshop a popular commercial program for editing images because they give it countless features it wouldn't have otherwise. (Each plug-in can offer any number of separate functions.)
   But many of these plug-ins are free. You just download them off the Internet. Start out by visiting http://www.ultimate-photoshop.com/.
   That's what makes Paint Shop Pro such a bargain. Used without plug-ins, it's a perfectly good image editor. With plug-ins active -- you can use a menu to choose from dozens or even hundreds in an instant -- it becomes a cheap version of Photoshop. Nothing else comes close.
   Are there other image editors for Windows worth trying?
   I'm impressed with a relative newcomer called Photogenetics, from http://www.q-res.com/en/quick.php3. It's free for 30 days and costs $30. What this program does best is fix photos. Even if you have an image processor already, consider getting Photogenetics. It's the first smart image editor, able to do things other programs wouldn't dare try. Try it and see.
   An older program called LView Pro remains one of my favorites. It's fast and easy to use, and, like the others, can be tried out for free. It costs $50. Get it from http://www.lview.com/.
   What about free image editors? If you can't bear the thought of spending anything on an image editor, you might already have a usable one -- if you have Office 97 or Office 2000. It's called Microsoft Photo Editor.
   Because the Office installation method is strange -- the spell checker is not installed unless you specifically check it off under "Tools," for example -- you might have missed the setting for the Photo Editor when you installed Office. You also get the Photo Editor as part of Word 2000, and no doubt it is included in other sets of office-type software from Microsoft.
   To install it, open the Help menu (the real one, not the animated paper clip) and type "photo editor" (without quotes) as what you are searching for. You should find instructions for installing it.
   Microsoft Photo Editor is serviceable and easy to learn. It was originally developed by another company, and works much better than typical Office 97 and Office 2000 components.
   What about the image editors you get "free" with scanners and cameras? A common one is Adobe Photo Deluxe. It's not bad, but that's all I can say about it. I get the feeling when I use Photo Deluxe that Adobe would like me to buy the "real" image editor it sells, Photoshop. (And, of course, that's true.)
   Some of the other image editors that come with hardware devices are acceptable for minor operations such as cropping and resizing, but why bother? Use the software YOU choose, not the software somebody hawking the product picked out. Keep in mind that the all the image viewers I wrote about last week can do simple image editing, so don't rush out and buy one until you're sure you need something more powerful than the image editors built into ACDSee, Irfan View, Compupic and Thumbs Plus.