Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

Description
Aimed at the home photographer, PhotoMagic is a software suite that has programs to
enhance, repair, and improve images, including special effects and “lossless” enlargement.
Of necessity, it has an easy-to-use interface that practically anyone can operate. It lets
you enhance colors, sharpness, and contrast, has noise removal facilities, and various
artistic tools to make photographs look like paintings. If you want to achieve traditional
photographic effects in your prints, it offers simulations of sepia, cyanotype, platinum,
silver gelatin, kallitype, Van Dyck, palladium, and many others.
One particularly interesting feature of PhotoMagic is the inclusion of the vendor’s
S-Spline algorithm, which means you can make exceptionally good enlargements with
this consumer package. Although the vendor has improved the algorithm for its professional
enlargement product (PhotoZoom Pro), the original version produced very
good results.
Comments
The press was lukewarm about PhotoMagic when it first came out, but the product has
good features, especially its enlarging module. Point-and-shoot users will like its cheerful
interface, useful exposure correction facility, and artistic effects.
At one time, PhotoMagic was also marketed by Shortcut (www.shortcutinc.com), who
dropped it in favor of the more comprehensive PhotoStudio 9 HOME.
Version: PhotoMagic 1.2.8 (2008)
OS: Windows 98, ME, NT4, 95, 2000, XP, and Vista; Mac OS X 10.3 and higher
RAM: 128MB
Supported file formats: As host
Price level: Approx. $50
Address: The Netherlands (contact by Web form)
www.benvista.com
Photobie
Chapter 10 ■ Image Editors 133
Vendor: Photobie Design
Purpose: Free image editor, with advanced layer support, templates, scrapbooking, and screencapture
features
Description
Photobie is a multi-featured (but entirely free) image editor that comes with transparency,
masking, and layer merging, once found only in the most expensive design
software. Its editing facilities include crop, copy, paste, and rotate/flip, and they are complemented
by image-processing facilities such as brightness, contrast, saturation, gamma,