Glamour Filter

Although digital cameras have built-in settings for helping you take the perfect photo, it may sometimes be necessary to make further tweaks using software applications. If you don't want to download and install a resource-demanding graphic processing tool like Photoshop, you can take a look at lesser apps that usually have a single purpose.

Glamour Filter is a great example that gives you the possibility to seamlessly apply a glamour effect to your images by adjusting the histogram levels automatically. It lets you preview results and set a soft focus effect or tweak saturation.

You don't have to go through an installation process because the simple photo editor is wrapped in a portable package. You can keep it stored in your collection of no-install software and fire it up whenever you need to make quick adjustments to your graphical content.

The developer hasn't given much thought to the visuals of the graphical interface, preferring to focus on delivering quick and easy functions. To get started, you can load a photo from file while keeping mind that Glamour Filter supports a wide range of formats. This includes PNG, BMP, JPG, EMF, TIF, PCD, TGA, GIF and even AVI videos.

Once the picture is loaded, you can add a glamour filter by clicking and dragging a slider until you get the ideal effect provoked by changing the histogram levels. The new photo can be previewed in a small pane in real time, so you can make tweaks before applying changes.

As soon as the modifications are applied, it's not possible to undo them. They are not automatically saved to file but you have to reload the original image from file and start everything from scratch. After adding glamour, you can explore soft focus and saturation effects by taking similar steps (move a slider until you obtain the desired effect).

If you're pleased with the results, you can copy the new image to the clipboard or save it to file. Once again, Glamour Filter is pretty generous with the output filetypes, giving you the possibility to even save photos to a different format than the original (image conversion).

What's more, you can adjust the quality as well as keep or delete EXIF, IPTC and XMP information. Advanced options can be configured for ICC/ICM color management, like input and output profile, rendering intent, black point compensation, transformation, and device link pre-calculation.

Taking everything into account, Glamour Filter doesn't seem like it has much to offer, but it actually does a great job at quickly adjusting glamour, soft focus and saturation. It's freeware, ideal for casual users who want to enhance their photos but don't know how to operate graphic editing software.