Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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Comments
This is an astonishingly well-made utility that is a joy to operate, especially in full-screen
mode. Move the cursors to the corners of the screen to access menus; scroll to zoom in
one mode, move to the next image in another. What could be simpler or more effective?
Version: FastStone MaxView 2.1 (2008)
OS: Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, and Vista
RAM: 128MB
Supported file formats: Major RAW formats; loads JPEG, JPEG 2000, GIF, BMP, PNG, PCX, TIFF,
WMF, ICO, CUR, and TGA; saves JPEG, JPEG 2000, TIFF, GIF, PCX, BMP, PNG, and TGA
Price level: Free to home users, commercial use approx. $20
Address: support@faststone.org
www.faststone.org
iPhoto
The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
Vendor: Apple
Purpose: Fast image viewer with full-screen display and RAW support
Description
Apple’s iPhoto is the natural image viewer of choice for Mac users who are not running
Aperture. It can provide browsing facilities for a database of up to 250,000 photos, can
open RAW files (including those from Leica and Leaf), and makes it easy to publish on
the Web or to obtain custom cards.
iPhoto’s full-screen editing means that you can display images at full resolution, with a
minimum of panning and scrolling needed to view them. Menus, palettes, and toolbars
are well implemented—they appear when you want them and disappear when you have
finished with them. It is all part of the Apple design philosophy, which pays as much
attention to the look of the tool as it does to its use.
iPhoto has always been presented as consumer software, with emphasis on sharing family
photographs or purchasing albums, cards, and calendars. With a .Mac account you can
use what Apple calls photocasting, which is an easy way to put your pictures online. Yet the
software also comes with keywording facilities for categorizing your pictures, and support
for Exif data and RAW files, so it clearly has some appeal for the photo enthusiast as well.
Comments
The upgrade from iPhoto 5 to 6 earned Apple four-and-a-half mice in Macworld, but
received some criticism for its ability to catalog off-line images. In this it fell short of applications
like iView Media Pro, which has since been acquired by Microsoft to reemerge as
Expression Media. The introduction of iPhoto ’08 saw some major improvements, notably