14 DAY TRIAL // With so many devices capable of taking pictures, everybody is a photographer these days. But if you want to stand out from the crowd you need to come up with something new. So how about framing the images yourself, at home, by hardly lifting a finger (except for clicking the mouse)? The software industry is developed enough to give you handy tools for the job.
Easy Photo Frame is a $29.95 instrument designed specially for adding frames to your digital pictures as well as various other objects. The 30-day trial of the application lets you do almost anything you want, with certain limitations, such as the impossibility to add some frames and stamps that are reserved for the full version.
There are no special, sleek looks or anything amazing about the interface, just a plain, simple window containing image processing options, frames and stamps to add to your picture. To tell the truth, besides the unimpressive looks, which are not affecting the functionality of the application, Easy Photo Frame's interface comes with the great defect of not supporting resizing on neither Vista nor XP, which may bug some of the users especially if the picture they're working on is smaller.
On the same note, the toolbar buttons are quite small. The natural thing here would be for the toolbar and its buttons to grow in size proportionally with the interface. So Easy Photo Frame is a fullscreen application to fiddle with on your desktop.
The largest part of the screen is occupied with the image you add while in the lower part there are the frames and stamps to pick from. In the upper part the toolbar provides image correcting and improving instruments like light and color adjusting, red-eye removal, zoom options, plus a transparency button.
All the frame styles and stamps in the application are grouped into categories so that you don't have to spend too much time reaching the one you desire. One thing has to be mentioned, though. Out of more than 16 different categories of frames and stamps present in Easy Photo Frame, only one category can be used during the trial period, and that's the free one. For anything else you will have to pay for the license before using it.
Once you buy the software, an impressive number of more than 400 frames and over 500 stamps will be at your disposal. But more impressive than the number of models present in the application is the way they look. And I must say that most of them are suitable for home use and cover the most varied themes. From classic ethereal ones, wood-looking ones, paper-cut, Christmas themed or fairy-tale motifs to aerial abstract flowers and plants, spray strokes and happy looking ones, Easy Photo Frame provides you with all sorts of frames.
As for stamps, these are elements that can be added to the image and, just like in the case of the frames, you can insert them by dragging and dropping them. The ingredients you can append to the image range from very varied areas. There are pop-cans, body art, several kinds of diversely shaped bows, three categories of emoticons covering all emotional states, flowers of different kinds and shapes, stencils, etc. One thing is certain: it will take you a while to get through all of them.
Each frame or stamp can be resized or moved over the image anywhere you want. And in case you just want to test them up, there is the possibility of undoing your actions. Only this won't revert to the previous position/size of the frame/stamp but clean the picture of it.
Another image embellishing option is text adding. Any commentary you deem suitable for the still can be added in all sizes and colors as well as in different fonts. Suffice to access the function in the toolbar, draw the region you want to fill up with your comment and the Text Style dialog will pop up with options for modifying the size, color, font and even formatting and alignment of the text.
Cropping certain parts of the image is possible, but unlike the regular crop tool in other software that lets you make any type of rectangular selection, in Easy Photo Frame the selection preserves the aspect ratio no matter what you do. This mischief does not go well with the big number of frames and stamps in the application or with its price. A bit more flexibility on this part is definitely a must, regardless of whether the app is used by novices or average users.
More options include adjusting the lightness, transparency or correcting the colors. For all of these preview is enabled so you see the modification in real-time. If in the case of the first two all you have is drag by a single slide in order to decide, with color adjusting there are slightly more options. Here you can modify the contrast of the image (brightness included), HSV (hue, saturation, value), HSL (hue, saturation and lightness), RGB, color equalization, FFT, adjust gamma, or sharpen the image. For each one preview of the modified picture is available.
All these will most likely sound like mumbo-jumbo to the average user, but they are actually quite professional tools. That's why they are on a totally discordant note with the overall software because the application seems to address a novice to average home user who does not have the necessary skills and background in image editing and adjusting.
If effects is what you want, Easy Photo Frame brings you a modest set of them. You can turn the entire image grey, add some wave effect, drop shadows, blur it, use the lens effect, round the corners, create a mosaic out of the picture or twist it. There are different values for each and the alterations are visible almost on the spot after clicking the preview button.
However, some of the effects will be rendered quite badly on large photos and the preview will not show you that as the pictures are resized and you can't see all the details.
Easy Photo Frame isn't special in any way. It does an average job and does not offer too much flexibility to the user. The price would be a minor issue if every other aspect of the app ran great. One of the advantages though is that you benefit from a huge collection of frames and stamps. Despite the advanced version number there are plenty of issues to fix and options to add in order to fit a larger pool of users.
The Good
It provides some image editing and adjusting options plus a brief set of effects to apply. Previewing is pervasive in the application and every change you make can be spotted instantly in most cases.
The Bad
Stamps and frames are not vectorial, which means that applied to larger images they won't preserve their quality and pixels will show.
The Truth
It is not among the best software to use for adding frames to your pictures, but it is worth a try, at least until the evaluation period. If you use it on smaller photos it'll do a fine job, but for larger ones you should seek a different application.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
