14 DAY TRIAL // On the Internet one can find all sorts of softwares. From the professional ones to home entertainment. In the field of photo-editing things are not different. Power users are working with PhotoShop, Corel or Gimp, while others fiddle with MS Paint.
Those were the extremes and between them there are hundreds of softwares that brag about doing a great job with your pictures, which claim that you can repair any kind of image with them. Some of them really have interesting features, while others just lack the essential ones.
For family persons there are also lots of applications designed to manage the family picture collection, catalog it, enhance them, create slide shows that you can view on your DVD player, etc. I found a software that can create beautiful slide shows and that can apply amazing effects to your pictures.
FxFoto is a Triscape software capable of organizing, archiving, and creating collages with your digital photos. It takes just 3.23MB of your disk space and the memory usage is not too high.
The interface looks pretty scary at the beginning, but you'll get used to it once you get to work. The options are so numerous that it takes a while to decide where to begin. The menu bar is composed of the File, Edit, View, Favorites and Tools.
The first three will open context menus of almost 20 options. Most of your interest will be focused on the toolbar, so this is where I will put my energy at work. The first menu of the toolbar is called Correct. Enter here in order to adjust the image. The submenu contains tools like improving the image (automatic/manual image balance), red eye remover (there are three sensitivity levels - standard, extra and custom); the blemish remover tool gives the user the option of containing the blemish area in three ways: pulling an oval around it, drawing a loop or adjusting a rectangle around the blemish.
The clone brush was a surprise for me as I was not expecting such a tool in this software. Fix a point on the image and then go paint anywhere in the image. In the "stamp brush" tool you can find a smudging tool and a translucent brush. Choosing the "file stamp" option in here will enable you to stamp the original image with whatever pictures you want (after clicking "file stamp" button, click browse to select the file and then apply it to the original image).
The Filter Effects section gives you access to over 70 effects to apply to your images. You can choose to apply the effect to the entire image or just to a user defined area (rectangle, oval, pattern or draw a loop yourself).
In the Crop section you can crop the image anyway you want to. The cropping options are the same as in Filter effect. In Frames, the user can apply different types of margins to the picture (19 frames available) which can be customized by changing the border/gradient/frame/margin colors; or go to custom settings and play with all the options in there (fade/ shadow/outer frame/matt width, outer frame margin, etc.). Do not forget to choose one or more of the frame effects.
The Text menu will embed text lines in the picture and there are six options in here: title text above selected image, dialog balloon text, caption text, overlay text, new text object and editing the selected existing text object.
The Draw option box contains more than ten drawing tools, an eraser and the file stamp and clip stamp (if you have an image in the clipboard). The Slide box will let you set the slide show settings. It contains four tabs where you can choose the slide effect and tour panning, the slide settings and the image click link. In slide settings the user will set the order of the pictures, the time for the cross fade or insert some audio file.
The Special Effects tab will allow selecting an entrance and exit effect, delay and speed. Tour Panning gives you the possibility to choose between automatic slide panning (here you have pan extent - five options - and the pan direction) and image tour stop.
That's pretty much it. This was the most difficult and impressive part of the software. How you use these options is pure imagination and creativity.
The Good
The software offers a very wide palette of options. You can crop images, add audio to the slide shows, the effects for the image and the slide show are also amazing. The Standard version (analyzed in here) is free, and you can use all the above mentioned tools with no restriction. For some other tools you will have to upgrade the software.
The user can burn the slide shows to a CD-R for future viewing.
The Bad
The interface is not so well structured and many of the users will feel discouraged.
The software can import files directly from a camera, but only the JPEG and TIFF file formats, which is a major drawback nowadays.
The Truth
It is worth trying the standard free version, but you will never see me pay for an upgrade to the full version. Let's just say that it is not my type. For all the other great options indeed it contains, I am sure that I can find a more suitable software.
Don't get me wrong, but it was pretty difficult to work with it, plus the Help menu was so hard to use that I decided not to use it anymore.
The truth about the software is that it has great features, but the package is just wrong.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
