SView5 for Windows

It's been our experience that even photo-editing programs that don't offer a ton of features can still be quite useful if they're well-designed; there's something to be said for an easy-to-use, professional-looking program. You can get a good idea of the level of professionalism that SView5 offers by trying to access its online user manual; when we did, we landed on a Web page that said "Sorry, no real manual available yet--you want to write one?" No, what we want is a photo editing program that's easy to use, and SView5 isn't it.

The program's interface is a cluttered square of check boxes, drop-down menus, and buttons. The image display pane is surprisingly small, and even though a larger preview display is available, the smaller view must be used when users are actually working with the image. All the basic imaging features seem to be here--users can rotate, crop, and resize images, as well as adjust image color, add special effects, and even edit metadata--but the features are not particularly well-organized, so the program is kind of a pain to use. Anyone with previous image editing experience should be able to figure most of the features out, but actually navigating between the features is not an intuitive process. And the aforementioned missing Help file ensures that if users do have questions about SView5's features, they'll go unanswered. Overall, we were not impressed with SView5 at all.

SView5 comes as a ZIP file. It installs politely but leaves a folder behind upon removal. We do not recommend this program; there are too many better image editors to choose from.