Suite as it gets | Bangkok Post: tech

SLOAN Ranger

There's a lot that goes into making "good" computer software, and the usual answer to the question of what is the best program is: "That depends."

It can’t make a poor quality photo into a work of art, but in fairly short order the options available in Image Analyzer can make your useless photo into something worth keeping.

It depends on whether the program does what you want, and this is Number One. Otherwise it certainly isn't best or even good enough.

I have a strong bias towards simple. When I have a choice I want the smaller, focused, simpler program, with every necessary feature, but not too many of the extra ones. More features lead to bloat, complexity and unneeded learning curves, not to "better" programs.

But suites can be sweet. Microsoft Office is a good example of a really large program collection which still manages to be smooth, and hide away the extra features where the aficionados can find them but the folks who want a basic word processor and spreadsheet program are well served.

Sunlit Green is not exactly a photo suite like those by, say, ACDSee. But it is decidedly not a huge, slow, difficult photo suite like, say, oh, ACDSee. (Remember when ACDSee was a fast, one-module photo organiser? Really? You remember? Wow, you're pretty old.)

Sunlit Green is two programs that effectively make a very nice suite. Combined, they do just about everything you'll want to do in normal working with regular photos and images.

PhotoEdit is the showpiece program. It is so good that some may see it as a replacement for their high-end editors like Photoshop or The Gimp. I don't claim anything like that, but it is a standout in many ways.

It is small (1.5MB) and, of course, fast, and you don't have to install it. Because it is standalone, you can carry it around on a flash drive.

It is not a "fun" program; it doesn't do cartoons or sketches or animations. But it does good work, and it does it well.

It resizes and crops, adjusts or replaces colours, applies layers and filters, and makes better khao thom than all but two of the night-time stalls on Ratchada.

Okay, one exaggeration. But this plain, simple, no-nonsense tool will make your good pictures better, and can make many of your accidentally lousy photos acceptable.

Without doubt, PhotoEdit is the pick of this two-puppy litter, but little brother BatchBlitz is no dog of a program.

BatchBlitz is a "photo categoriser", according to SunlitGreen. Which means it is a small and fast viewer and organiser, allowing you to tag, filter and - most importantly - find your photos with easy-to-understand searches.

Because it is a "batch" program, BatchBlitz gathers and then carries out your wishes for dozens or hundreds of photos and images. You can watermark a couple of thousand of your most prized photos you want to display on a website, say, and resize them at the same time. The program can create folders by date and move all photos taken on those dates into the correct folders.

BatchBlitz will use all the Exif data in your photos, and then let you search for all pictures taken, say, at Chiang Mai in mid-January.

The big boys like Picasa and ACDSee can manage some of these tasks, but at the cost of the bloat and doing things the Google or ACD Systems way for everything. Standalone suites and programs support the concept that these are still personal computers.

Despite all of the above, another photo processor caught my eye recently, and I'm going to put it here.

Image Analyzer does good work on photos that are less than perfect quality. For its size and (free) price, the software may be the best correcting program I've used.

Sometimes, the one-time photo opportunity just doesn't turn out. Everyone in the photo has red-eye, or two of the people moved, or a couple of raindrops hit the lens. Sometimes you drop a paper photo in a shoebox, and when you scan it four years later, it has picked up dust or worse, and the colours have faded.

So the form is to load your digital photo in the Analyzer - or scan it or import it directly from your camera - and start fiddling.

There are some very common fixes on hot keys such as automatic colour correction (Ctrl-U). But in general, simply try out the obvious fixes under Edit and Filters, then try out the not-so-obvious. Adaptive noise reduction, for example, can do quite a lot to make a spotty photo better.

Anything that doesn't work can be immediately cancelled with the standard go-back methods, by pressing Ctrl-Z, or clicking on Edit and Undo.

I have barely touched the highlights of Image Analyzer. In addition to what the program gives you, there are numerous pre-set plug-in filters for free download.

This is not a magic program, however, and you are not going to correct every glitch or problem in every horrible photo. But the amount of corrections this easy program can make in a short time, with no learning curve, is impressive.

You will find Image Analyzer at logicnet.dk/meesoft/analyzer.