Viscom Photo for Windows

Viscom Photo lets you perform minor edits on your digital images and create collages. Everything works as promised, but there aren't many features or editing tools and the end results look OK, but not great. The biggest downside is that once you've created a collage, the only way to view it is through the program, which limits the program's overall usefulness.

Installation is quick and the program opens to a plain window with two tabs under a File menu. The first tab is where you'll create your collages and the second is for editing images. Both tabs have three panes, with a file tree on the left to choose images and view thumbnails, a Control Panel on the right, and a large middle pane for creating a collage or viewing the image you're editing. There's no Help file but with so few options, it really doesn't take long to master nearly all of the program's basic features. We started with the Photo Collage tab to get a feel for things. Here, you can choose from 17 different backgrounds that are decent but not great and include quite a few flower-themed options. You can drag and drop images from the file tree folder and then move them around on the background. There is only one other option to resize the background. After you're finished, you can save the collage in a proprietary file type that can only be opened within the program. There aren't any sharing options. The second tab, Batch Image Converter, also supports drag and drop but we were only able to move one photo at a time to the viewing pane. The Control Panel includes three tabs. In the first, Home, you can add a frame and resize. There's also a pull-down menu under the confusing heading, Interpolation, which has three unexplained options: Bicubic, Nearest Neighbor, and Bilinear. We couldn't detect much of a difference when we tried these out, so the purpose remains a mystery. The second tab, Filter, lets you adjust the brightness and sharpen the images or apply a sepia or grayscale effect. The third tab, Object, has slots for four images and four text fields but no explanation of how to use them. Ultimately, you can add a basic text box to the photos, but the process was far more convoluted than it needed to be.

Viscom Photo is free but no bargain. With limited features and functionality, this is an app you can skip.