Organise and edit your digital camera and phone photos
Zoner Photo Studio has grown from a simple image organiser into a multi-function toolkit with a wide range of features. The idea is that it's a one-stop shop for all your photo requirements. This latest version packs in more features than ever, but it has a price that is close to Adobe Photoshop Elements and Corel Paintshop Pro X7 Ultimate, which are both excellent and tough competitors.
Zoner gets off to a good start, and accessing your photos is very easy. If you have the free Android app on your phone, you can browse them directly from your computer with no syncing or transferring required. Using the Navigator panel on the left, you can select the cloud option and browse your phone photos, load them into the editor and work on them like they were on the PC’s disk. Networked PCs can be accessed from the Navigator, and you can connect to a PC, open the Public Pictures folder, browse them and load them. It imports from cameras, scanners, PDFs and more.
The My Pictures folder on the PC’s disk can be shared, and one click starts a DLNA server. DLNA clients on a phone, tablet, television or computer can then access your photos. The Navigator also shows a photo timeline with images organised by date. Photos are shown as thumbnails, and two locations can be viewed side by side. Titles, descriptions and keywords are easily added and there are batch facilities enabling actions like renaming or file type conversion to be applied to multiple images. It's a flexible and powerful organiser for your photos.
Zoner Photo Studio has an extensive array of editing tools too. To mention just a few, there are quick fixes, levels, curves, colour temperature adjustment, exposure enhancement, sharpen, blur, chromatic aberration, barrel and pincushion fix and more. In addition to this, there's a comprehensive collection of tools. There are too many to mention, but to give you an idea, there's a text tool, predefined shapes, lines, deform, morphing mesh, clone, paintbrush, eraser, seven different selection tools, healing brush, red-eye reduction and so on.
The tools are good and there are lots of options. For example, the paintbrush has diameter, opacity, density, blur, spacing, colour and mode. There's limited support for layers, but you can create a layer by pasting in a selection from another image, add text or shapes and so on, choose how layers are mixed and set the transparency. Zoner’s interface has different colour schemes, panels that can be shown, hidden and resized, multiple tabs for editing several photos, plus an organiser tab.
New features in version 17 include an exposure gradient filter for changing the exposure of only part of an image, such as where the sky is too light or the ground too dark. Smart automatic edits choose the best tweaks, and there are more and better tools for working with RAW photos that the better digital cameras can save.
The more you use Zoner, the more it grows on you, and it's a powerful program that is an interesting alternative to Photoshop Elements and Paintshop Pro. Roland Waddilove
A great photo organiser and editor that has a good range of features.