3D Image Viewer

Some would say that there isn't much you can add to an image viewer. Suffice to include a few effects, a couple of editing options and some image enhancing settings and you have an image viewer to the taste of thousands, if not more. Well, how about a new perspective for viewing your images? How about viewing the pictures 3D?

Twins Visions is almost ready to bring that new view of your images and a better organization. For now, the application is in beta stage, so you should expect a few glitches here and there from time to time, and the download will be free until October 1st. Besides being designed to give you a brand new look at your images and stacking them up the best way possible, the software can also ease the process of sharing the pictures to the world, via a Flickr account.

So, after a smooth installation process, some configuration will be needed � basic stuff like defining the folders Twins Visions should look for pictures (you can make the search automatic or define manually the exact locations), provide the details for the Flickr account (the software ca be granted permission for reading, writing, deleting data), but in our case the connection always resulted in error. The final step consists in defining the files to be associated with the application � JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG and TIF formats are supported.

Twins Visions comes with a neatly designed interface, shiny and extremely easy to manage. It incorporates three basic modules for viewing the images, editing them or sharing over the Web. View mode lists the folders the app is taking the pictures from, lets you create albums to view in 3D, as well as perform an extremely specific search within loaded boards, created albums, local folders or a custom path.

View Mode

Local folders section can be enriched with more locations from Tools menu, although it would be great to be able to achieve this directly from this section. Unfortunately, all you can do here is add a new empty sub-folder that cannot be populated with items. If more image directories are added to this part of the software, you can add them to the Showroom which permits a 3D view of all elements added and all the images imported.

Showroom is actually the centerpiece of the application and the most interesting part. All elements it displays are arranged three dimensionally, allowing the user a comprehensive look over all appended images. More than this, if the boards are crawling with pictures, for a better look at them, you can customize the zoom level by simply dragging by a slidebar (the effect is absolutely marvelous). There are different views for the boards, similar to Mac Expose feature: Cylinder, Colloseum (the more boards, more magnificent the view), Vertical and Horizontal Wheel, Discs and Carousel.

Hovering the mouse over an image in a board will give you a larger preview which includes image details, as well as its name.

My Albums section simply allows creating picture collections from the specified Local Folders and adding them to the Showroom. It is a simple way to group similar images together in case they are all bundled in the folders on your computer. There isn't a specific limit for the number of albums you can create and add to the Showroom, so I guess it all depends on the performance of your computer.

Search tab is simply extraordinary through the options it offers. Users can employ a large series of criteria in order to find either a single image or a group sharing the same parameters. The search can be done either in the already loaded boards in the Showroom or in the albums created, local folders or simply by defining a custom path. As for the criteria, although the parameters include only EXIF data, File properties and Image details, there is plenty of configuring available.

EXIF includes manufacturer of the camera the photo was taken with, the model, the name of the artist, comments or the date the picture was taken. With File properties, you can narrow the search down by typing in the name of the photo (or part of it), set the size and define the approximate creation date. Customizing these details brings forward a different set of options that permit searching for creation/modification or last access date as well as time interval. With Image details, defining the size is again available, but there is also the possibility of choosing the orientation (landscape or portrait) as well as aspect ratio and format.

Right beneath Showroom view there is a set of functions for quickly correcting some aspects of the pictures: resize, rotate, flip or fix brightness, levels or remove noise. And under these functions there is a thumb strip called "basket" that can shelter all the images in the boards and, with a couple of clicks shift viewing to single images, load them up in editing mode, etc.

Edit Mode

This is the section where users can balance the picture to their liking, playing with effects, color adjustments, editing metadata or general fixes. All four tabs concert into bringing the way the image looks closer to your quality standards.

The categories may not be completed yet, so there is still time to hope for more options. A set of eight filters running from auto colors, brightness fixing, gamma correction, color levels setting and noise removal (there is no setting for this one), all through red-eye removal and crisping up the picture, awaits for configuration from the user. It is just a simple matter of dragging by a slider and an almost instant preview will be available. If the result is not satisfactory, you can cancel the filter with no problems.

Adjustments of the loaded image include setting up the brightness, colorization, contrast setting, altering the hue and saturation as well as horizontally flipping the picture, rotating it or zooming in and out. Thanks to the live preview function, there should be no problem using any of the options, but there may be some errors sometimes due to the beta stage of the application.

The list of Effects is not large, but contains a couple of sections for artistic results (emboss, grainy, heart-shaped mask, oil painting, pixelate or scatter), blurring (simple blur, gaussian, median, motion and tent), colors (black and white, grayscale, invert and sepia) and distortion (fish-eye and swirl). Besides the fact that there is room for plenty of them, Effects area handled really well and there was absolutely no error during the processing. However, with some effects, the software did take a bit longer with the preview.

All fixes, adjustments and effects are actually add-ons in the software and can be enabled or disabled from Preferences menu by un-ticking the corresponding checkbox.

Metadata section of Editing mode may come a bit poor at the beginning. But adding new images will definitely open a new perspective. EXIF tags to be added are so numerous that I gave up counting at 57. If there is anything a professional wants, Twins Vision has it: digital zoom ratio, exposure mode/index/time, focal energy, orientation, photometric interpretation, planar configuration, saturation, sensing method, subject distance range, etc. (these are but a few tags Twins Visions can read from a picture). More than this, each tag comes with a brief description for the user to understand what exactly it stands for.

Just like any modern image viewer Twins Visions is perfectly capable of rendering all loaded images in a slideshow featuring various effects, which can be taken to fullscreen mode. Ctrl+S is all you need to press for the spectacle to begin.

Configuring the entire application is not too much of an effort, actually, if you've become familiar with it, set up is quite a breeze. General options let you add folders to create albums from, associate the file types to be opened by Twins Visions or configure automatic update interval. View settings refer to enabling automatic changing aspect ratio for the boards in order to fit the screen, limit the showroom capacity, display the skybox (don't ask what this is because there is no hint on this one), set the slideshow window size, duration for displaying an item, transition duration or transition effects (there are twelve of them).

For editing, the list of options is not as rich, including only the number of maximum of history items to be preserved and the wait time for generating a preview (in milliseconds).

Twins Visions is in beta stage, yet comes off as a breath of fresh air for the category of image viewers. Showroom features a three dimensional view of the user-created image albums or local folders, with various display effects. The application sports editing options for fixing some image imperfections and making them more to your taste, and also makes available slideshow viewing.

The Good

3D viewing of albums in Showroom is by far the coolest feature of the product and flexibility in this sense allowing you to change boards' formation only adds a big chunk of value. Also, the preview of the image when hovering the mouse over it is something to boast with.

Editing options permit previewing the result before applying the effect and making the necessary adjustments simply involve dragging your mouse until the desired outcome is obtained.

The Bad

The application is in beta stage and there is plenty to fix. The major downside is that it moves with difficulty taking a bit long to load.

The Truth

Twins Visions is certainly different from all image viewers currently on the market, making available 3D viewing of picture albums created by users. It comes with an innovative solution and easy to handle options for editing the images.

However, the beta stage of the application is felt and errors may occur from time to time for the simplest of the operations. Some options are not functional yet, like the possibility of uploading to your Flickr account.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action:




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