Zoner Photo Studio 18

Overview

Zoner Photo Studio is an all-in-one photo manager that is capable of importing, viewing, editing, and publishing images as well. It has wide range of features which any professional photographer would be pleased to have and some of these are, Red Eye Reduction, Healing Brush, Adjust Color Temperature, Sharpen, Batch Filter, and Resize. This tool even lets you add Digital signatures; create 3D images, Web galleries, and PDF slideshows; publish your images to Facebook, Flicker, Picasa or Zonerama; and assign data from GPS to your images.

Installation

Installation of Zoner Photo Studio is quite simple and quick. All you need to select during process is the installation type you want – Express or Custom. Other than that, you can choose to launch the application immediately after installation completion. Before starting the application, it will be asked whether you want to use the paid version or trial version (for 10-days or 30-days). If you choose 10-days trial version, even then later on you can exceed the period to 30-days. The operating systems that support this application are: Windows XP/Vista/7/8.

Interface

The interface of the application might look a little complicated initially to less experienced photographers but on exploring it, they will know that it is actually very well organized. The dark grey theme of the application gives it a professional look. The working area consists of four main segments including – Import, Manager, Viewer, and Editor, and there are different sets of features for each type of segment. The menu options in the toolbar also update according to the selected segment.

Pros

• You have the freedom to import images to your computer from various sources including cameras, memory cards, and USBs
• Apart from choosing the source of images, you can also set the Target location where you want to keep the copied images. Subfolders can also be created for imported images and these are automatically named based on the selected criteria
• Eliminating the manual effort of backing up images, ‘Make a second copy’ option automatically creates a backup of each copied image in the desired folder
• The application has the ability to automatically assign information like author and copyright to images, rotate images as per EXIF orientation, copy the images that are not in target folder, and mark images as read-only
• The Manager module lets you gain full control for managing your images, for instance, with Navigator you can browse your entire system to open the images; the Browser pane shows the thumbnails for the selected image folder and the view mode for these can also be altered; Preview pane lets you view details of selected image
• The Information window shown to the right side of Browser is very handy since it displays all the available information of the selected image like File size, Created/ Modified date, Dimensions, Compression, ISO, Focal Length and even the camera details like its Make, Software, Model, and so on
• You can amplify the quality of images with help of abundant tools in Manager module, such as Enhance colors, Sharpen, Resize, Convert File Format, Batch Filter (for adjusting hues, saturation, vibrance, lightness, brightness, and contrast)
• Viewer module offers a very stylish way of viewing images; you can select the ‘Filmstrip’ view which displays your selected pictures in a filmstrip mode and the selected picture is shown in larger size above it. If that is not all, you can even play slideshow or customizable slideshow
• In the Editor module, there are plenty of tools, effects, and filters for editing your images. Simply select the image from the filmstrip, then from the right panel adjust its Exposure and from the left panel perform actions like, Red Eye Reduction, Crop, Rotate, Deform, PaintBrush, and Iron

Cons

No cons found here.

Alternatives

Some of the alternatives for Zoner Photo Studio that need no introduction are - Picasa, IrfanView, and FastStone Image Viewer. These photo managers have already created a niche in this field and can be used without hesitation.

Conclusion

Zoner Photo Studio has all the tools and features that any professional photographer would dream of having, to support his art of photography. Beginners might need time and patience to explore and understand its workflow but once they do, it is more likely that they would simply love this application. Although it works on high system resources and acquires good amount of RAM, but even then it is worth all this. You have plenty of time to analyze it for free, so go-ahead and try out this amazing application.