14 DAY TRIAL // Photography is an important part of our everyday life and can be used to express yourself, to capture a state or emotion, and to exhibit the beauty and uniqueness of various places from all over the world. Pressing the shutter release button is not always enough and, as a result, you might need to “intensify” an image and bring certain details into focus.
This is where Intensify Pro steps in to help amateur and professional photographers alike to apply interesting effects to their photos by making a wide array of adjustments and fine-tune them until the right details are exposed.
Intensify Pro is a comprehensive photo adjustment application that enables Mac users to accurately adjust the contrast, detail, sharpness and structure across different tonal ranges. Moreover, Intensify Pro comes as a standalone Mac OS X application and as a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, Aperture, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Photoshop Elements.
In order for Intensify Pro to run smoothly, your Mac should have at least 4GB of RAM, an Intel Core 2 Duo processor or better. It is worth mentioning that you need to have at least one of the above mentioned applications installed if you intend to use Intensify Pro as a plug-in.
Intensify Pro is a user-friendly OS X application and its straightforward installation process highlights that even more. Thus, to install it on your Mac, you have to download the lightweight DMG disk image, mount it in your Finder and copy Intensify Pro to the Applications folder or a location of your choice.
On top of that, Intensify Pro features a clean, intuitive and customizable user interface that enables you to quickly load your picture and start the enhancement process. Most tools are accessible via the top toolbar, while the right side panel allows you to browse the presets collection, add or remove layers and make various adjustments.
Additionally, with Intensify Pro’s help, you can bring out the fine details in your pictures, even those hidden in smooth or low contrast areas. By selectively applying Structures across shadows, highlights and mid tones, you can effortlessly and rapidly bring out your pictures’ best features, and make sure that the viewer’s attention is drawn to the most important spot in each and every photo put on display.
The great thing about Intensify Pro is that you can preview your adjustments and changes in real time and even compare the obtained image to the original with a click of a mouse button. You can split the preview window horizontally or vertically to preview both versions side-by-side and zoom in different parts of the photo for an in-depth analysis. In addition, the in-app Navigation Window makes it easy to zoom in or out and view your location within the picture.
Furthermore, the Presets tab from the side panel helps you browse through Intensify Pro’s entire collection of filters and manually adjust the intensity of the applied effect. You can also easily “star” your favorite effects in order to add them to your Favorites list.
For example, the Details panel helps you bring out stunning hidden details in your photos without worrying about excessive noise or artifacts. Consequently, you can add or remove details at a global level, only in the underexposed or overexposed areas.
More demanding users can try the Pro Contrast function in order to obtain richer and deeper colors, as well as more details in their photos. Hence, you can adjust contrast levels across shadows, mid tones and highlights along with the Offest value to make things more interesting.
Thanks to the Micro Sharpness adjustments, you can increase the quality of your image by improving the sharpness of your pictures without adding noise or other annoying artifacts that can ruin the overall photo. You can also experiment with advanced parameters such as Dehalo, Radius and Masking if you wish to fine-tune the dramatic effects and obtain high quality results.
Like any other professional photo enhancement application, Intensify Pro offers support for multiple layers and provides masking tools. Thus, you can use up to five different layers to combine different effects and gain control over masked sections in your images.
Because most photographers shoot in RAW to preserve the details and information captured by their digital camera’s image sensor, Intensify Pro provides support for fine-tuning RAW photos and working at 16 bits of data per pixel for the highest possible image quality and detail augmentation.
Social networking addicts will be happy to know that Intensify Pro seamlessly integrates sharing features that can be used to tweet or upload the modified picture to Flickr, Facebook or SmugMug and share it via Messages or Email. What is more, the Export drop down menu enables you to open your photo in iPhoto, Aperture, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Photoshop Elements, as well as Snapheal, FX Photo Studio and Focus 2.
As mentioned earlier, Intensify Pro can be used as a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, Photoshop Elements and Aperture. However, Intensify Pro plug-in’s tools and features cannot be used as a built-in plugin in the supported apps, but, instead, it is designed to help you send an image to the Intensify Pro app for processing and automatically re-load the processed image within the plug-in’s host app for further adjustments.
Another drawback is the fact that Intensify Pro does not offer batch processing capabilities. This can prove to be a big disadvantage, especially for photographers that want to batch process thousands of pictures for their time-lapse videos.
Unfortunately, we’re sad to say that the stability and performance of Intensify Pro come with a big hit on your Mac’s CPU and RAM resources. For example, experimenting with filters, performing different adjustments and applying masks cost us 146% of our iMac’s 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor.
When it comes to RAM usage, Intensify Pro required 450 MB just to start, and engulfed more and more RAM as we added effects, fine-tuned our photos and masked areas. Hopefully, future versions of Intensify Pro will be able to better manage the available resources and deliver the same performance.
The Good
The long list of customizable presets, layer support, masking and image enhancement tools make Intensify Pro an essential tool for both casual and professional photographers.
The Bad
Also, we consider the lack of a batch processing function a big oversight for an application that targets intermediate and professional photographers.
The Truth
Hopefully, the batch processing capability will be added in future updates and the integration with other image editing applications will be improved.
