Picturesque

Overall Opinion: You don't need to be a trained photo refinisher to make your pictures look beautiful. Picturesque provides you with all the tools you need to create crisp and gorgeous photographs. Whether you're looking to post up pictures of yourself and friends online or put together a professional print ad, Picturesque has the tools you need without requiring you to spend hours training. Picturesque is not a fully featured photo editing tool but rather a way to filter and finish existing photos. It offers five tools that both experienced editors and amateurs can use to quickly and efficiently improve the look of photographs. Picturesque is not a tool that will replace Photoshop in your toolkit, but for it's purpose, it gets the job done well. If you're looking to apply a specific effect to a whole gallery of vacation photos or create thumbnails for sharing on your website, it's an ideal choice. You can count on the finished results to look good, though you won't get the amount of detail oriented control that's available with higher end art studio software. The clean interface makes it easy to work in batches. All you have to do is drag a folder into Picturesque to get the result you're looking for. The images available appear in a strip at the top of the screen as part of a minimalist interface that makes it easy to apply effects. Resizing and exporting can also be completed in batches, and the process is just as simple and intuitive as applying effects to photos. Rather than give you full, granular control, Picturesque breaks down photographs into five components, and lets you apply a range of filters and effects within those parameters. Picturesque users can manipulate stroke, curve, shadow, reflection, and perspective, and the range of options available in each are rather robust. Picturesque provides hundreds of built-in styles with the base package, but users have significantly more control over the filters they apply to their photographs. Sliders under each parameter give you the option to alter each photograph individually or even set a template for use across a wide range of pictures. Checkboxes give you even more control over the standards you use for your photo manipulation. The user interface of Picturesque deserves special mention. It's stripped down design and drag and drop interface mean you can easily pull up Picturesque, make the changes you need to photographs, and shut the program back down in a simple matter of minutes. While it can't serve as the principle photo editing software in a professional's catalog, it's a sensible utility tool and one that can either complement a more robust photo editing suite or serve as an alternative to users with less specific demands.

Pros: Makes a great supplement to more robust photo editing software Quickly and efficiently works on batches of orders at a time Affordable, flat rate pricing makes it an easy purchase

Cons: Limited functionality means it's not going to be a cornerstone of any artist's repertoire Doesn't really come into its own unless you're working with large volume of photographs