Editing aids
Making life easy for you.
W hile we’ve done our best to gauge the capabilities of the tools featured in this Roundup, it’s difficult to assess which one is the best suited for your needs unless you spend time with it. The consensus from forum boards for each program, and other popular hang-outs for photographers and hobbyists, is that users prefer to work with one tool, but depending on their requirements may occasionally switch to another.
Between the clicking of a photograph and sharing it with the world, your pictures will go through several different steps, which are referred to as the workflow. A typical workflow has the following steps: click a photograph > import > organise > develop > output. All the tools in our Roundup are determined to provide a streamlined workflow.
Each of these steps can also evolve over time. For instance, your organisation will be little more than pictures sorted into different folders to begin with, but that’s imprecise and tedious to work with. With the exception of Photivo, all the tools provide for smarter organisation using metadata.
With darktable, you can even search your picture collections using tags, ratings, colour labels and much more.
You’ll spend the most amount of time with these tools working on developing your images, performing post-processing operations such as cropping, noise reduction, adding blur, removing red-eye and so on.
While the other tools have these effects distributed throughout the interface, Photivo’s interface present a more streamlined workflow. The controls, listed in tabs on the left sidebar, are designed to be worked from top to bottom. The tabs at the top features the filters that ought be applied first. This is why the Geometry tab, which lists filters used for correcting distortions such as pincushion, comes before ‘Lab sharpen and noise’.
Except for Photivo, all the tools also support batch processing of images. On most, however, this just means basic operations such as using a batch name, or defining the output type and quality. but Fotoxx supports even more useful functions and can, for example, be used to righten images, add tags and timestamps,