Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

126
The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
Of particular note is the customizable interface that includes a full-screen mode and the
tools for correcting common lens distortions. It is easy to correct lens tilt effects (converging
verticals) and other problems like barrel distortion or vignetting. Best of all, it
runs in any of the major environments, making it one of the most well-supported image
editors around.
Version: GIMP 2.4 (2008)
OS: Windows XP and Vista; Mac OS X; Linux; Sun OpenSolaris; FreeBSD
RAM: 128MB minimum
Supported file formats: GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and rare format support via the GIMP plug-in
registry, a repository of optional extensions
Price level: Free source code, sub-$100 packaged
www.gimp.org
Helicon Filter
Vendor: Helicon Soft
Purpose: All-round image editor for digital photographers, with many professional features
Description
Helicon Filter is a versatile, effective, but amazingly low-cost image editor. It supports
template-based renaming, voice commenting, color profiles, and Exif/IPTC data. It lets
you make lossless rotate, copy, delete, and move operations. Noise reduction is one of
the program’s strengths and it comes with both a dead pixels filter and a dust sensor filter.
There are the usual contrast, gamma, and exposure controls, with a gradient haze
compensation tool. It has one-click and manual white balance, B&W conversion,
vignette correction, spectral sensitivity controls, and first-rate sharpening facilities.
Helicon Filter crops to all popular paper sizes, with batch cropping and presets for different
monitors and mobile phones. Retouching—which is a set of functions that typifies
an image editor—is another of its strengths, with edge-sensitive brushes for
blurring, sharpening, and changing color, brightness, and saturation. It offers a distort
brush “to fix protruding ears and similar problems.” Processing tends to be a little slow,
but is improved by using Helicon Filter Pro with its support for multiple processors.
There are three editions of Helicon Filter: free, home, and pro. After 30 days the home
and pro evaluation versions revert to the free edition, losing the “expert modes” and
some functionality, whereas the free version has full functionality for 30 days.
Comments
Developed in the Ukraine, Helicon Filter shows every sign of becoming a mature, capable
editor. It is available in English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Italian.