Your Personal Photo Artist

Every once in a while, whether you’re a photography enthusiast or a novice with a digital camera, you manage to capture a breathtaking landscape or an original moment that you want to bring as close as possible to a work of art through clever editing and with fancy effects. Usually, this is the job of powerful graphic editors with loads of options, plug-ins, visual enhancements, but also with a pretty hefty price tag. But in fact, all you need is a simple piece of software that can add some ingenious graphical effects while offering a couple of basic editing functions like resizing, cropping or rotating the image and, yes, it would be great if you didn't have to pay a dime for such an application.

Well, as there are quite a few free image editors out there, and some of them were reviewed in the past weeks, here's one a bit different from the rest: it's called Splashup Light and it is an Adobe AIR app. This utility meets all the above mentioned requirements and it only needs the AIR runtime to function. The first things you will notice about it are the simplicity of the installation and the rather straightforward utilization of the tool.

As with most applications built using the AIR technology, the interface looks great and the controls will no longer look like the ordinary and quite boring Windows default buttons. There is a certain inner elegance that will also be reflected in the output pictures Splashup Light produces. All the functions are well placed, easy to access and employ, while their variety is nothing short of impressive. The app comes with no less than thirteen effects and six editing tools you can use to beautify your digital photos. It can even acquire images from your webcam so you can instantly take snapshots and modify them as you please before sharing them with your friends.

The palette of visual effects comprises the classical Brightness and Contrast, Hue and Saturation controls and adds enhancements like Blur, Sharpen, Desaturate and Colorize. With them you can easily adjust the light and colors of the pictures before moving onto more complex and fine adjustments. These refer to the Red Eye reduction and Levels customization that will allow you to eliminate the unwanted red remains of the camera flash and configure by yourself the entire RGB spectrum or individually set the Red, Green or Blue levels. These are by no means the only improvements that can be done to a particular image because there are some more "toys" to play with. Thus, you can use the Emboss, Find Edges or Sepia filters on the loaded photo to give it a truly special appearance or optimize the coloring with the Enhance feature.

With the above mentioned effects you'll be able to greatly enhance the looks of any picture but with Splashup Light you also get an array of editing options to further alter the original aspect of the images. The software enables you to add a variety of shapes that can frame in portions of the loaded photo or input custom texts anywhere inside the picture. The application also offers Resize and Crop tools that come in handy when you need to single out a specific portion of the image you're editing. The new sizes can be inserted manually while the selection for the cropped sector can be done using the simple drag and drop technique or also by hand, if you know the exact dimensions of the area you want to pick out. If you need to modify the angle of the entire photo, you have at your disposal two functions, namely Rotate and Flip.

An interesting and useful feature of Splashup Light is the live capture ability that will help you record images from a connected webcam. In doing so, you can easily capture and edit on the spot original pictures that can be later on shared with your friends. The graphical formats that can be handled with this utility are JPG, PNG and GIF, while for exporting (saving) your work only the first two are available. An important aspect also worth mentioning is that this utility uses quite a lot of memory and this can clog your system if there is not enough RAM or if you have other resource consuming applications running.

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