Image Editing Software

Editing scanned images under Windows just got less expensive. ZSoft Corp.'s $ 199 PhotoFinish 1.0 provides basic tools that will satisfy users who occasionally need to edit scanned images. While it costs significantly less than more powerful than any other image editor software such as Aldus Corp.'s PhotoStyler (priced at $ 795) and Adobe Systems Inc.'s PhotoShop (priced at $ 895), PhotoFinish manages to be both reasonably full-featured and easy to use.

Because it doesn't do color separations and only provides 256-color palettes, however, the package is not suitable for professional artists or desktop publishers. PC Week Labs tested PhotoFinish by editing scanned TIFF and PCX images as if they would be used in a newsletter. The images were scanned at 175 dots per inch (dpi) and 300 dpi and with 24-bit color. PhotoFinish works with a wide variety of file formats.

Images are conveniently viewed using two image windows: One shows a reduced view of the whole image, and the other shows the immediate work area. The tool palette can be moved anywhere on the screen and makes tools easily accessible. Settings that required numerical input were quickly set by using a handy slider control on the mini scroll bars. This proved to be faster than either entering numbers or scrolling.

PhotoFinish includes 12 color palettes with useful color ranges such as metallic, earth and sepia. In addition, users can create their own palettes and save them for later use. The easy-to-use color picker resembles the picker in Adobe's popular PhotoShop for the Macintosh. The PhotoFinish color picker offers only 256 separate colors, however, while PhotoShop's provides a continuous range of colors. To display a 24-bit color image on a 16-color display without color distortion, PC Week Labs turned on PhotoFinish's “optimize display” option, which simulated a higher-resolution display and allowed the image to be edited properly.

One weakness of PhotoFinish is that if a user selects a section of the image that forces the cursor to go beyond the edge of a window, the image inside the window does not move to follow the mouse pointer. Users must instead use a navigation tool to move from one area to another.

Slow with Large Files PhotoFinish also had problems opening a 22M-byte TIFF file until more hard-disk space was freed. PhotoFinish performed better with smaller files. It opened a 950K-byte, 24-bit color PCX file at 175-dpi resolution in 12.9 seconds; Aldus' PhotoStyler took 12.6 seconds for the same image. With a 6.37M-byte TIFF file at 300 dpi, however, PhotoFinish took 13 minutes and 13 seconds, while PhotoStyler took a mere 1 minute and 21 seconds.

Despite its lower price, PhotoFinish includes many of the features available in its more expensive competitors.

For example, PC Week Labs frequently used PhotoFinish's “eyedropper” tool to pick up primary and secondary colors. With this tool, the left mouse button picks up a primary color while the right button picks up the secondary color. PhotoStyler, on the other hand, requires the clumsier approach of holding down the Shift key and clicking on the mouse simultaneously. PhotoFinish's “magic wand” tool, similar to PhotoShop's, also proved useful; PC Week Labs used it to select regions with similar colors, and then used the color-replacement tool to replace colors.

PhotoFinish does lack some features found in its rivals. PhotoShop, for example, has a spline-based line-editing tool that's not available in PhotoFinish. Also, unlike PhotoShop, ZSoft's package cannot edit in cyan, yellow, magenta and black mode. While PhotoStyler imports Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) bit maps and PhotoShop imports EPS bit maps and objects, PhotoFinish does neither.