STOIK Imagic

STOIK Imagic is a large, feature-packed photo album, organizer, manager, and editor. It's also a retouching tool, a calendar maker, a media cataloger, a video editor, and a drawing tool. In short, it's a full-featured graphics suite with an emphasis on digital photographs. At 80MB, it's a big download, but since it's compressed, it's a fast one, too, and setup is virtually automatic, including scanning your system for images. Anything else? You bet: it's free.

Like all proper graphics apps worth the name, STOIK Imagic's interface is finished in mod dark-gray tones with white lettering. Imagic automatically scanned our system and displayed the results in a left-hand tree view under the Browse tab. Clicking any directory of images displayed thumbnails; clicking a thumbnail opened the image in a separate view. We could create customized slideshows easily from any selection of images. Tabs labeled Photo and Video let us edit images or video using a wide range of tools, effects, brushes, stamps, filters, and image fixers. We opened and edited an image, undoing, redoing, and saving the results. We could frame images; use them to create calendars, jigsaw puzzles, wallpaper, and clip art; distort, warp, blend, pinch, punch, and explode images; add text, images, colors, shapes, and textures; simulate charcoal, pencil, mosaics, and other artistic styles and effects; and correct for a wide range of photographic defects, even correcting spherical and trapezoidal lens defects via horizontal and vertical sliders. The warp tool superimposed a grid view that we could pull and tug to distort the image, creating Pinocchio noses and fun house mirror effects. We also liked the Improvement Wizard and the way Imagic offers advice for correcting and improving images. Imagic's processes and tools are efficient and work well, even in the inevitable comparison to Photoshop. However, Imagic is no Adobe clone and doesn't try to be, especially in areas like pen compatibility. While they naturally share many functions, their missions differ considerably. In any case, STOIK Imagic is freeware; Photoshop isn't.

STOIK Imagic is available in an upgraded Pro version with some extra tools, such as improved video authoring and raw development. Most users will probably be perfectly satisfied with the free version's raft of features and capabilities, though. We certainly were, and we plan to keep it around.