Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

and facilities for making 3D images (or analglyphs) using images taken from slightly different
positions. For the latter effect, Photo Studio automatically combines the two
source photos into a single image. When you view this composite image with special
glasses that have one red and one blue lens, it appears to be three-dimensional.
Comments
The successor to Zoner Media Explorer, Zoner Photo Studio supports 26 bitmap formats,
6 vector formats, 9 video formats, and 10 audio formats. This makes it a multimedia tool
as well as an all-in-one image editing/publishing package. At the time of writing, RAW
processing support is limited chiefly to Canon CRW files in the Pro edition only, but
this will undoubtedly be expanded in future versions.
Some users may find the vendor’s marketing approach to be overly complicated, because
there is continuing availability of four earlier versions, each of which is available in
Professional, Home, Xpress, and Classic variants. Moreover, through the magic of OEM,
the product crops up in the catalogs of other vendors under different branding. That
said, no one can fail to be impressed by ZPS’s extraordinary range of well-implemented
features, not least of which are its HDR, analglyph, and panorama-creation tools. These,
together with extensive editing/publishing tools, make it an exceptional value for money.
Version: Zoner Photo Studio 10 (2008)
OS: Windows 2000, XP, and Vista
RAM: 256MB
Supported file formats: Major image and multimedia formats, including BMP, JPEG, and PNG;
Canon RAW (CRW)
Price level: Pro edition approx. $85
Address: ZONER, Inc., 51 Georgetown Dr., Dallas, GA 30132, United States
www.zoner.com
Summary
Chapter 10 ■ Image Editors 141
Image editors are multi-featured, often to the nth degree like Adobe Photoshop or Corel
Paint Shop Pro Photo, perhaps the two best-known editors currently available. To be a
true image editor, software must certainly have cropping, masking, retouching, and
resizing features as well as provide image enhancement, sorting, printing, and sharing
functions. To these the developer may add a selection of the features that are described
elsewhere in this book, always at the risk of confusing the user with an embarrassment
of riches. Adobe has added retouching facilities to Lightroom, although you still need
to dive into the industry-standard Photoshop for a full set of editing features. If you
have not looked at Nikon Capture for a while, check out the NX version with Nik
Software’s U Point technology. It offers a viable alternative to masking when you need
to make alterations to specific areas of the image, thus reducing the need for an editor.