In this review of Photo Effect Studio from Everimaging, I'll take a look at this desktop app designed to allow Mac OS X users to easily apply creative effects to their digital photos.
Traditionally desktop photo editors have been designed to give users the tools to adjust and enhance their digital photos. The main aim being to produce images that optimize the original photo to create a generally naturalistic result. Users could of course push the tools further to produce more creative results, but this generally required a reasonable understanding of the software to produce aesthetically pleasing images.
This position, however, appears to be changing with a greater focus being placed on applications that are designed to apply creative effects to your digital photos, rather than producing enhanced naturalistic images. This move started on mobile devices, allowing users to quickly apply filters to digital photos taken on camera phones for sharing with friends.
Photo Effect Studio is a desktop app for Apple laptop and desktop users to achieve a wide range of creative results from their digital photos, with very little or no experience of working with a photo editor.
The User Interface
Photo Effect Studio is a native app and so looks completely at home on OS X. The user interface integrates nicely in the desktop environment and is easy on the eye. It is also extremely clearly presented making it very intuitive to use, though new photo editor users may find the right hand column a little intimidating. More experienced users, though, will find it a nice addition offering a degree of manual control.
Across the top bar, the controls are pretty well self explanatory, with controls for opening and saving files and undo/redo buttons the first you'll encounter. The Compare button allows you to toggle between the original photo and the currently selected effects.
The effects on offer in Photo Effect Studio are split into three groups, each with a button to access them. The three groups are FX, Vignettes, and Frame and when one of these is clicked, its content is displayed down the left hand side of the window. Finally in the top bar are Flickr and Preferences buttons. The first allows you to share your completed images to Flickr directly, without having to open another application and the second opens the Preferences dialog. There are very few options available in the Preferences, but this does make it well suited for a user base who will probably want to spend their time creating rather than fine tuning how the app works.
I've touched on the two side columns and will look at them in more depth, but for less experienced users who find the right hand column off putting, there is a small triangular arrow about halfway down that you can click to hide the column.
The bottom bar of the window contains controls to allow you to zoom in and out of your photo and also to rotate it, though only in increments of 90 degrees.
The Effects or Fx in Photo Effect Studio
The Fx effects are one of the most important parts of this app and users shouldn't be disappointed with the range on offer. You can display all of the effects or select from the drop down menu at the top of the column to just display sub sets, such as Lomo, Vintage or Overlay.
In my case I did notice that if I changed from a sub set to All, it would take quite a few moments for the interface to catch up and many of the thumbnails would be blank for a period. It's a minor issue, but does introduce a slight hiccup to your workflow.
You will see a thumbnail preview of your image with each effect applied in the left hand column and clicking a thumbnail applies the effect to your photo in the main window. It seems that you can only apply one effect at any one time, so if you want to combine effects, you'll have to save your image and then reopen it.
The usage of effects is very much a click and go process with no options for adjusting the strength at which effects are applied, but the right hand column does open up a degree of flexibility for those who do want to experiment further.
Vignettes
The Vignettes group contains a selection of vignette types, some of which are quite naturalistic and reminiscent of genuine lens vignetting, while others are rather more creative.
There should be plenty to keep most users happy, though as with the effects, there is no option for adjusting how the vignette is applied. I particularly miss this in respect to the lightening effect that is applied to the center of images along with the darkening of the edges and corners. This can very easily burn out highlight detail in the center of images, though this probably won't be an issue for most users.
However there is also a Vignettes feature in the right hand column that offers users the ability to specify their own type of vignette. This is actually designed as a lens correction tool to help you to hide weaknesses with your lenses, but it is just as well suited as a creative tool for applying vignettes.
Between these two features, most users should feel that they have all of the control over this type of effect that they would need.
Frames
The final group of edits that you can make to your digital photos is to add frames. This group appears to me a bit of a mixed bag and some of them really wouldn't be out of place on a cheesy free clip art web site. Still that might actually be seen as desirable to some and I'm sure that if I used this app regularly, there might be occasions when I succumbed too.
As with the effects and vignettes, the left hand column displays thumbnails of your photo with the frames applied and you just have to click a preview to apply it. If you want to remove it, clicking the None preview at the top of the column will remove only the frame, leaving any applied effects and vignettes in place. You will have to switch to FX or Vignettes if at any time you wish to remove a previously applied effect.