Image Editing Software

Image manipulation program can really go to town with filter selections, and PhotoFinish retains a few goodies from its costlier cousin. The Equalize filter gives a graph of color or gray concentration and lets you redefine the range, which is helpful for, say, lightening a muddy original. The Blend filter is the full-fledged equivalent of the tool of the same name, allowing a subtle smoothing of rough edges. If those edges are beyond smoothing, the diffuse filter will try to hide the jaggies behind a haze. Emboss, Mosaic, Motion Blur, and Edge Detect are for more specialized, sometimes ghastly, effects.

Also included is a graph that goes with the Color/Gray Map option for an effect similar to the Equalize filter. The graph allows more subtle gradation and also lets you apply it to selected areas of the image. Magnification of 25 to 1,600 percent allows you to be as precise as necessary. At the highest enlargement, you're presented with a distinct grid of individual pixels. This is almost too detailed--it's about as helpful to clear sight as placing your eyeball against a newspaper. Still, there are artists who like to tweeze problems out of their work.

You can, of course, create a drawing from scratch, and PC Paintbrush fans will find a home here. That program's drawing tools are included among PhotoFinish's 25 painting tools, along with a bunch of refinements and additions. If you're the conservative type, however, you can just stick to modifying existing images. There are fun tools like the airbrush, which directs mist of your chosen color at the image, the more heavy-duty spray can, and the basic brush. Select areas to edit with a straightforward rectangular clip, use the lasso tool to round up a free-form area, or use the magic wand to choose a work area on the basis of color intensity. You can also draw lines, curves, circles, and boxes of varying thicknesses and colors.

PhotoFinish offers default support of many popular video grabbers as well as flatbed and hand scanners; in addition, it supports the SPI (Scanner Programmer Interface) standard to which most units now conform. Elements of a hand scan session can be joined using the Stitch feature, allowing pixel-perfect alignment of the component strips.

Twenty-four-bid color images can be opened and retouched even if your display hardware can't handle so much color, but you'll have to learn to mentally translate onscreen dithering into colors-to-be. PhotoFinish imports and writes to a slew of popular image file formats (BMP, TIFF, GIF, Targa, and more) and easily shifts files among its internal-use formats of black-and-white, gray, 256-color, and 24-bit color.

So that your display can be as precise as the original, a monitor gamma test is included for use with a specially designed image of nested color boxes. It works well with Windows set in 640x480 pixels by 256-color mode, but failed to provide any appreciable result at 800x600 by 256 and 1,024x768 by 256, using two different sets of drivers on a Tseng 4000-based video board.

Not surprisingly, PhotoFinish uses whopping amounts of memory, the same problem that plagued PC Paintbrush. The problem is partially solved in the Windows environment, but it still becomes evident when you pile up a lot of complicated images in a session (you can work on eight at a time) and the computer is forced to swap memory to disk. The program was tested on a 486/33 with 8Mb of memory, but three big pictures and a complicated cut-and-paste procedure caused a memory traffic jam.