Free Photo Booth

Webcams are not only useful for talking to friends and family over Skype but they can also be fun for taking various snapshots of yourself. There are a lot of entertaining apps that come packed with an array of effects which can be applied to these webcam snapshots, such as Free Photo Booth.

Free Photo Booth is a Windows tool that requires minimal configuration and which can help you generate an entire album of selfies with different kinds of image filters, whether you want to keep the photos to yourself or share with friends.

As far as the installation is concerned, the only aspect worth noting is that .NET Framework must be installed on the PC or the webcam tool won't work. Luckily, modern Windows versions have this software framework built in, so you only have to make sure that it's enabled.

At startup, Free Photo Booth displays a list of your integrated and/or peripheral webcams, so if you have multiple devices, you can pick the favorite one.

The webcam is immediately started afterward and you should be able to view the footage embedded in the main app window. The filters are shown next to this area (on the right) and it's necessary to apply one before taking a snapshot.

Effect options vary from black and white, vintage effect and inverted colors to emboss, swirl and pixelized. Unfortunately, there are no kind of control tools available, which would've practical for just blurring your face instead of the whole picture, for instance.

You can explore the effects and preview the picture before capturing it, an action that can be done by clicking the camera icon on the bottom-right corner of the footage.

All screenshots are saved to a folder that you can change if you're not pleased with the default setting. The pictures have JPG format and are named automatically.

This option cannot be changed but you can open the destination folder in Windows Explorer straight from the GUI. Also, the images can be previewed in a film strip on the panel.

In conclusion, Free Photo Booth may not have rich features but it comes bundled with a decent range of image effects to apply directly to your webcam footage before taking snapshots and saving pictures on your PC.