14 DAY TRIAL // With all the photo editing applications that people have at their disposal, taking a photo of someone or something isn't a simple process anymore. The latest technology helps you transform a really bad picture into a high-quality one by removing the noise, modifying colors or applying various effects. Still, if you want to publish your photos, you should make sure they have that little touch of magic necessary to impress the viewers. Here's a little application that will help you do just that, namely, to beautify your pictures with several interesting effects.
Developed by Acqualia, Picturesque has as main purpose aiding you in making your photos beautiful. Whether you want to add a shadow, a reflection or round corners to your photo, with Picturesque this should not take you longer than 5 minutes. Thanks to its preset features, you can use it as a batch photo processor and apply the same series of effects to all of your pictures. Behold the perfect tool for creating a photo gallery in no time!
The Looks
Although the effects it applies on your images are quite spectacular, Picturesque is a simple application, with an easy to use interface. Picturesque features a toolbar with the available image effects in the lower part of the window and a preview bar displaying your images in the upper part. Drop your photos in the program's main window or on its dock icon and you're ready to start "cosmetic surgery" on your photos. Each effect button will open a small caption allowing you to customize the parameters.
The Works
Working with Picturesque is very easy: choose the effects that you want to apply to the selected photos, configure their options and save the resulted images in the format of your choice. You should decide which is the background color that would best fit the modifications you intend to make. For example, a black background would be better for a picture with the frame in a light color, while a white background is the solution to choose for a picture frame in strong colors.
The five effects included in the image enhancement process are: Perspective, Reflection, Shadow, Curve and Stroke. Here's a brief presentation of their functionality and parameters.
Perspective gives a 3D look to your photo by using just 2 parameters that you can configure according to your preferences: the horizontal rotation of the picture and its elevation. The next feature, Reflection, adds a semi-transparent reflection of the image with the selected length, opacity and offset. With two effects out of the way, your selected photos already show an interesting change. Next, you can choose to apply a Shadow of your chosen color, and set the appropriate values for the Blur Radius and the opacity of the shadow. You have total control of the shadow position relative to the picture, by selecting the preferred distance and the angle made by the shadow and the image.
Even if you can't add physical frames to these photos, Picturesque can easily overcome this impediment by rounding their corners and painting a color stroke on the outside borders of the images. This way, you get your own custom virtual frame. The Curve effect is the one that you use to transform any of the corners of the image into curved ones with a maximum level of curvature of 100 pixels. The Stroke effect gives to a picture that finishing touch, by creating a colored contour of the selected width: you can go for a subtle contour of just 3 pixels, or you can add a thick frame with a width of 100 pixels. Picturesque also provides you with a crop function that allows you to select only a representative part of the image.
If you've found the perfect combination of effects for your pictures, you don't have to memorize it and recreate it, over and over again for each new set of photos. This is exactly what presets were created for. You can save the current configuration of effects as a preset and apply it afterwards to any collection of photos. By default, Picturesque remembers the last preset that was used.
A secondary function of Picturesque could be that of a batch image resizer or renamer. In this case, you only need to open the set of pictures and press the Save All... button. The configuration window features all the options available in a basic program for resizing images: file format and quality, image dimensions, background transparency, and also a couple of renaming settings: name suffix, file numbering and the possibility to automatically overwrite duplicates.
Another thing that caught my eye, although it's not relevant for the program's functionality, is actually the only option available in Picturesque's General Preferences window: Show current image in dock icon. As the name says, if you enable this feature, the dock will show a customized icon of the application including a small preview of your current photo.
The Good
Through few customizations and graphic effects, Picturesque makes your photos look as if they were taken right off an exquisite media presentation. Its workflow is simple and intuitive, giving the user a pleasant and productive experience throughout the entire photo editing process.
The attention for details, the small but impressive customization features and its entire candy-eye appearance, combined with its performance level leave the user with a very good overall opinion.
The Bad
By default, Picturesque opens the images at a level of zoom that may not always be the best for viewing them. No matter how much you enlarge the window, the images still remain at that maximum zoom level. Still, this doesn't interfere with the size of the output images. That can be easily set in the Save As configuration dialog.
Since the application is targeted at the normal user, not providing advanced editing features, the price of a single user license being $34.95 seems a little high, especially if you take into consideration the fact that you can find professional graphic tools available for free.
The Truth
Picturesque is the perfect tool for the average user who wants to beautify pictures with the purpose of publishing them on a webpage, a blog or even that of creating a photo album. Maybe you shouldn't rely on it if you're looking for more professional features, like layering or advanced selection methods. You can decide for yourself by giving Picturesque a try and enjoying all its features. The unregistered version has the small limitation of a watermark placed on the resulted images, an annoyance that you can eliminate simply by purchasing a license.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
