The Download Blog

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Though Photoshop rules the roost when it comes to image-editing software, not everyone needs many of the more advanced functions Photoshop has to offer. Many casual digital camera users probably don't want to spend the money on higher-end software, either.

That's where Pixelmator comes in. With Pixelmator ($59) you get most of the tools, color-correction features, effects, and layer management options you would find in a program like Photoshop, but without the steep price tag. The recently released version 1.3 adds several more useful features and fixes bugs from previous versions.

Familiar image-editing tools like the selector, magic wand, pencil, eraser, and paint bucket tools are all included. But you also get retouching tools for blurring hard edges and sharpening tools to improve blurry areas and enhance images to your liking. With the layer manager you can experiment with changes before making them permanent, complete with opacity sliders making it easy to compare between layers. If you really want to get down and dirty, you play with over 130 filters and effects, many of which give you similar results to Photoshop. When you're finished, you can save your work in several different formats making it possible to continue working in other programs or upload your work directly to the Web.

Familiar tools and pallets, color-correction and adjustment features, along with layer management tools make this app easily worth the price

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Certainly Pixelmator will not make you want to throw out Photoshop. But if you're not a pro photographer and just need some better than average image-editing tools, this app offers all the right features at an affordable price.

Photoshop CS3 for Mac is still your top choice if you're serious about image editing. Loaded with features for color-correction, photo enhancements, filters, effects, and layer management, Photoshop is the pro-level image-editing software to measure all others by. If you'd like a closer look at some of the features Photoshop CS3 has to offer, check out our First Look video to see if you're ready to download the trial.

There are a lot of image editors out there, but few of them are designed with professional photographers in mind, and even fewer are designed by photographers themselves. Capture NX 2 for Windows and Mac is one of those rare editors designed by professionals but is easy enough for hobbyists to use, and Nikon has just given it a major overhaul.

Capture NX simplifies and enhances common photo editing tools in a customizable layout.

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Available for purchase at $179.95 or upgrade at $109.95, the program introduces a revamped interface, closer integration with other Nikon programs such as View NX, and a battery of new tools that simplify and enhance the photo-editing work flow. This should make any photographer seriously consider making the jump for nearly every kind of edit.

Although Capture NX's improvements on the photographer's work flow are undeniably helpful, the most unique new tool in the program are Control Points. Based on proprietary Nikon technology called U Point, the control points allow the user to make selective changes instead of global ones. From sharpening to color changes, the points can affect image-wide edits, but their true power lies in the ability to narrow tweaks to a user-defined space.

There are several control point-based tools. The Black, Neutral, and White Control Point tools, which look like eyedroppers in front of circles on the toolbar, are used to manage color. By clicking on one and then clicking on the image, a small circle appears with sliders extending from it. Moving the sliders adjusts both the desired effect and the diameter of the circle that radiates from the control point. If you don't like the positioning of a point, but are happy with the effect, click and drag the point to a different location on the image.

The Selection Control Points eliminate the need for editors to manually mask off the part of the image they want to change. They function the same way as the color control points, except that they can be used to sharpen, reduce noise, adjust contrast, saturation, and more. Once a point has been created, the control panel that natively lives on the right of the editing window can be used to select the desired effect.

Control points and sliders make Capture NX's photo-editing workflow easy to manage.

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Another excellent new tool is the Auto-Retouch brush, which does exactly what its name implies. What's impressive about this version of the popular tool, found in many programs, is that it can accomplish with one click what other programs take four or five. This may not sound like much initially, but when repeatedly removing dust or skin blemishes the saved time is noticeable.

Other improvements to the program include common hot keys and further compatibility with Nikon's View NX software, making batch edits and creating common settings a cinch. The Quick Fix menu also cuts out repetition by offering up a selection of standard changes ranging from curves to lens correction. The Quick Fix wouldn't be as useful as it is if it were inaccurate, but clearly a lot of work has gone into making the algorithms controlling the tool flexible and effective. The Soft Proof tool that lives at the bottom of the open image window makes accurate printing pain-free.

One of the subtle improvements of the program is the manner by which layers have been worked in. Called Steps here, they are woven seamlessly in the work flow, making control of previous changes as simple as unchecking a box. Most of the changes are made via sliders, controllable both from the image and from the Edit List, which is where the Adjustment Window lives.

However, the layout of the various components is malleable--users can hide, minimize, and drag windows around at will with no delay in processing time. This happens, in part, because Capture NX 2 is much smaller than Photoshop, which needs to appeal to designers as well as photographers. One drawback of Capture NX is that it's not capable of creating an image montage easily. However, since those are rarely high resolution images because they're made up of many smaller photos, it's not a glaring oversight.

Capture NX 2 combines multiple editing options into one manageable panel, cutting out extraneous mousing around.

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Capture NX supports TIFF-16, TIFF-8, JPG, and Nikon's own proprietary NEF format. It does not support Canon's CR2 or other RAW configurations, which should decrease the appeal of the program to non-Nikon photographers. Images can be saved as TIFF, NEF, or JPG, metatag information can be kept or destroyed as the user sees fit, and changes saved to a NEF can be easily undone by unchecking the changes from the Edit List.

Overall, as a lifelong Photoshop user for my personal photo editing and printing needs, Capture NX 2 is nothing less than spectacular and should be considered by any photographer looking to enhance their work flow by cutting out tools that they never touch and emphasizing the ones they always need.

UPDATED: The relationship between Nikon, Inc., and Nik Software has been corrected. Although the Japanese division of Nikon does have an equity stake in Nik Software, Nik is an independent company. View NX and Capture NX are owned and published by Nikon, Inc. Also, Capture NX 2 and View NX do not support non-Nikon RAW formats, as previously reported.

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Just about anybody with a little computer experience can put a bunch of photos together onscreen and print them out. But what if you want something a bit more exciting? Maybe something that gives you the flexibility to control the layout, add captions, and upload your work to the Web so your friends and family can enjoy it. JAlbum, for both Windows and Mac is one of my long-time favorite programs. JAlbum just got a major upgrade, so if you're looking for a way to get your photos out to family and friends, it's definitely worth checking out.

Browse skins using JAlbums instant previews.

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JAlbum helps you make snazzy photo albums from premade templates, giving you a professional-looking album in just a few clicks. What's great about JAlbum is that everything is customizable, letting you resize thumbnails to fit your desired specs, write captions the way you want them, and set the overall look of the album to fit your photos. You can even add different file types to your albums--such as sound and movie files--to add spice to your project. Did I mention the interface is completely drag-and-drop?

Get more skins and layouts at the JAlbum Web site.

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Once you have your album laid out to your specs, JAlbum lets you share your creation in a number of ways. Using the integrated FTP client, you can upload your album to your Web site or you can use the integrated Web server to serve your album from your computer. You can even create an account at the JAlbum Web site to get free hosting for your albums. So all your friends and family will need to do is point their Web browser at the link you send them, and your holiday photos will appear onscreen without the need for extra downloads.

Make quick edits to your images with the new image editor.

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The folks at JAlbum sent a press release today to tell me about the latest version, so I reacquainted myself with this great software and got a look at some of the new features. One welcome addition is the integrated image editor that adds plug-ins for common tasks such as red-eye removal, image cropping, and color adjustment, and they also added a few simple image filters for more drastic effects. There are only a few skins included in this version, but it's easy to add more using the huge skins section at the JAlbum site. While you're there, you can also check out other user's albums for more ideas.

If you've been looking for a new way to post your photos, JAlbum is a great choice with an extremely easy-to-use interface and plenty of options to create the perfect album.

The FastStone Image Viewer is a good find for a multipurpose image tool. Although the main interface looks too cluttered with buttons at first glance, the three main windows are intuitive enough once get your bearings and several included skins make it easy on the eyes.

Clicking a thumbnail puts a larger view of the shot in the lower-left pane, and you zoom in simply by dragging the mouse around. You can resize, crop, remove red-eye, and adjust color, brightness, and contrast. You'll also find a few simple effects and filters, including Lens, Waves, and Morphs. Other nifty features include multiple folder slide shows, batch cropping and batch conversion. Though its image-editing tools can't compete with those offered by a full-featured suite, there's still enough here to make a decent amount of tweaks to your shots, and fast.

PhotoScape comes with templates for arranging image collages.

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If you're looking to put together a Valentine's Day collage for your sweetie, it's mighty late to be worrying about creative gifts from the heart. So get a jump on that photo mashup (or is that car crash?) you've been planning for next year's Valentine's Day with PhotoScape, a freeware image editor that's surprisingly feature-rich.

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Those of us who are artistically challenged need all the help we can get when it comes to design software. A new tool called Vector Magic--the result of Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory research project by James Diebel and Jacob Norda--seems to be a valuable addition to the arsenal of free apps available for creating and editing images online.

Basically, Vector Magic takes rasterized images (composed of pixels) and converts them to vector (or scalable) images. The result is an image that can be easily resized with no blur or pixelation--an ideal format for logos or other images that need to appear both large and small. Vector Magic supports the uploading of JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, and TIFF formats, and can export its final products as EPS, SVG, or PNG files. A warning on the Vector Magic blog today warns users to be patient because of a recent upswing in the load on its servers, but I had no problem at all converting JPEG images of various sizes into vector images in no time at all. ... Read more

I've played around with a variety of online image editors, but "played" should be the operative word. For any serious image-editing work, I've always used traditional software methods. I hadn't found a Web service that could replace my usual standby apps (Photoshop at work, and Paint.NET at home) ... until I tried the new Web-based rsizr this weekend. I was blown away by its speed and ease of use in resizing and cropping digital images.

Even cooler than those basic-yet-essential functionalities are the app's flexible image-sizing features. Rsizr uses an algorithm called "seam carving" to expand or contract images in any direction while maintaining focus on the areas rich in detail. In essence, it lets you stretch or condense pictures without making them look blurry or smooshed. With a bit of practice, you can also perform the trick of removing people or objects from photos. ... Read more

The free app Paint.NET offers strong image-editing features in a small package.

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Adobe Photoshop is a fantastic software product. I use it at CNET every single day. However, I don't own a personal version at home, and I find that I don't miss it much for my own limited image editing and graphic design needs. For cropping snapshots, removing red-eye, resizing, or creating LOLcat images, I turn to the free image editors available at CNET Download.com.

The grandaddy of free design software is the GIMP (short for GNU Image Manipulation Program), which provides much of the functionality of Photoshop, with a very large and dedicated community that produces tons of valuable tutorials. However, the GIMP isn't the most user-friendly application. Newbies would be advised to try GIMPshop, which puts a Photoshop-like interface on top of the GIMP's core functionality. ... Read more