Imagia Lite 1.6.1

Overview

The Image Editing category of software has some pretty tough competition, with powerhouse programs like Adobe Photoshop, and even free programs like PixIr. When I started using Imagia Lite, the first thing I learned was that my original image would never change, which is a nice feature - but nothing really groundbreaking as I could just make a copy if I wanted.

Imagia Lite isn't a doodle pad, it's specifically a program used to edit mainly photos by adding effects and altering the colors. There are some brush tools, but those are used for adding blur effects and similar actions. You can choose from a few different categories for edits including Effects, Colors, Basics, Masks, and more. There are also basic crop, rotate, move, etc type actions you can perform.

Social media is integrated into Imagia Lite as well, making it easy to share edited photos directly from the program itself. One thing that makes Imagia Lite enticing for professional photo editors, is the fact that it can open RAW file formats, and process them relatively fast compared to other free programs.

Installation

Imagia Lite has a pretty basic installation, just download the executable and go through the installation wizard. You will be asked if you want alpha stage translation, but if your language is English you can just hit no. Imagia Lite works with Windows Operating Systems.

Interface

Unfortunately, Imagia Lite doesn't really excel in this category, which really sucks because Interface is extremely important to image editing software. I'll start with my #1 pet peeve, which is forced full-screen. Now, luckily I had two monitors, but had I not it would have been pretty frustrating. I tried a few different methods to get into windowed mode but it was no good.

Other than that, the UI got a bit buggy at times, for instance there was a minimize button - but it didn't work. And the close button seemed to have a very small window of pixels you could click on, that wasn't quite on the X. The program crashed on me twice (with an i7 and 12GB of RAM), but fortunately when I reopened the original image it had saved the work I did.

Some of the tools were a bit hard to use the way I wanted to, and a few of them seemed inconsistent when I tried to use them multiple times. Although I will say I did enjoy how each set of actions was categorized.

Pros

• Powerful photo editing program that is free to use
• Supports RAW files
• Over 40 different settings templates
• Has most of the actions and effects you'd like to use
• Doesn't change your original image regardless of what you do

Cons

• Buggy UI with a forced full-screen
• Occasional crashes (but it did save my progress)
• Adds a watermark to images on the free version

Alternatives

For photo editing software, you may want to also take a look at Gimp, which has been around since 1996. And of course there is always Photoshop if you're willing to dish out some cash.

Conclusion

Imagia Lite is a program with a lot of potential to be something great, but is slightly held back by a not so great interface. Still, this is worth giving a shot, especially for those seeking a program compatible with RAW files.