14 DAY TRIAL // I do not know exactly how IDs work in all the countries of the world, but generally, the moment you enter the administrative system database of a country and get your adult documents a picture is stamped on them for recognition purposes. How that picture reaches your personal documents differs from one country to another. However, in some cases its standard size is requested in other places, and for other purposes, such as company ID, diplomas, all sorts of enlistings, etc.
Getting a standard-sized picture of you is not a demanding task and it does not cost much either. But why spend the energy of going to a professional photographer when you can do it in the comfort of your home, without having to beat your brains out with some sort of complicated image processing software?
KC Software's IDPhotoStudio comes as a free solution to the task at hand. It is a lightweight application designed specially for printing and automatically adjusting images to fit ID sizes all over the world. The freebie is simple enough to be handled with no problems by any type of user.
Almost all the options of the software are visible at a first glance of the interface. The application includes them in a comfortable way without crowding the interface at all. First of all you have to load the image, which gets automatically resized to the proportions of the window. It can be rotated by 90 degrees in case it is not already in the right position.
However, cropping or adjusting the size of the image is out of the question as these functions have not been introduced yet and this means that you will have to use a different tool to select only the part you want. Sure, this is necessary only if you use a larger image filled with irrelevant elements for the job. The image used for the test has been resized and cropped in PaintDotNET in order to avoid bad resizing of IDPhotoStudio. You do not have to resize it to the standard dimensions, because the app will do a perfect job with this, but if you crop from a high-resolution image you'd better shrink it a little before loading it into IDPhotoStudio.
The application provides the standard dimensions for lots of countries, although most of them use the same size for ID images. In order to find the state you want your ID image to be compliant with more ease, the developer provides an alphabetic order of the states.
Once the image has been adjusted and you have chosen the dimensions you want it to be printed for, you can proceed to setting the number of copies per page. How many of them you want to print is up to you, but the maximum is calculated for an A4 sheet. The good part is that you can have a preview of the entire sheet containing all the images before proceeding to actual printing. Moreover, you can save the preview as a JPG image for later printing. For this all you have to do is press the “Print Now” button in the lower right hand corner of the interface.
IDPhotoStudio also features a set of options. These do not refer to the application itself, but to the printer used to put the ID pictures on paper. It is nothing special, as everything is standard set-up for the number of copies you want and selecting the printer to be used in the process.
Though it is a simple program, IDPhotoStudio sports some effects that can be applied to the picture. Thus you can choose to greyscale the picture or apply sepia effect. Both effects look great and in case they're not to your taste there is the possibility of eliminating the effects and returning to the original colors. Even if this is a freebie that does a pretty good job with creating ID photos, some more effects would be great.
One more option included in IDPhotoStudio is language. The software features 27 languages and dialects that comprise German, Chinese, Spanish, French and Italian, but also Catalan, Danish, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Korean, or Latvian. So it can also be used by those do not necessarily speak English. Language change is done on the spot and no restart of the program is needed.
Although overall IDPhotoStudio does a great job, it has its shortcomings that cannot be overlooked. Adding crop and resize functions would greatly increase the value of the software as the need for a separate image editor would be eliminated from the start. Also, permitting the positioning of the photo in the “frame” by simply dragging it with the mouse and free rotation would make for great additions.
The Good
The effects that can be applied (greyscale and sepia) look great and the fact that you can revert to the original state of the image after playing around with them only ads value to the app.
The Bad
The Truth
With no doubt, adding some image editing functions would eliminate the need for a separate image editor and increase its value.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
