OrbitZoom

Although taking pictures is a common thing now, it doesn’t mean pictures are common themselves. Cameras have evolved greatly in the past several years, with pictures now under stunning resolutions. To simply view and analyze them, applications like OrbitZoom might be what you need.

It takes a little while to get the application up and running on your computer, with the setup process requiring little effort on your behalf. However, you do need to make sure that Adobe AIR is installed on the computer you want to use the application on, because it was built on this platform and can’t even be installed without it.

The initial window is empty, but this can quickly be solved by dragging a sample picture of interest over it. The image immediately loads, but there aren’t any controls you can manage, or any visible buttons for that matter. This is only because every operation you can perform is done with the mouse.

In case the background doesn’t quite suit your style, it’s possible to change the color tone by clicking anywhere other than the picture itself, but you can only pick different intensities of gray. What’s more, you might find it a little disturbing that the cursor suffers from movement latency, but it has little impact on overall practicality.

The name comes from the application’s ability to quickly perform zoom in at great levels. Although not shown, zoom is performed fluently, and only requires you to press the left mouse button, and move the cursor further away from the area of interest. Unfortunately, there aren’t any automated processes in order to attempt and improve quality, while controls are only handled with the mouse.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that OrbitZoom is a practical application you can use in order to analyze image details by easily zooming in on the area of interest. To be fair, it’s pretty easy to use and get acquainted with, but feels a little rough around the edges because of the somewhat difficult controls, and no possibility to scroll through photos from the same window.