Artistry Photo Pro
The fun of Instagram with some of the power of Photoshop
$19.99 Developer It’s About Time Products, helloiat.com Requirements OS X 10.11 or later
One of the reasons that Instagram is so popular is that it makes editing images incredibly easy. You don’t have to go on a course or spend hours on YouTube learning how to use it; you just scroll through a few options, give your image a tweak and it’s ready to share. Artistry Photo Pro tries to achieve the same thing in a desktop package with a little extra control.
The first step is easy, after you’ve opened an image, you scroll through the options at the bottom of the screen until you find one that you like the look of. Once you’ve made your treatment selection, the controls for all the adjustments that have been applied to create your chosen effect are shown in the column on the right of the screen. If you want you can use them to tweak the image further. Simple sliders, backed up by clickable numbers, make the edits easy and a series of thumbnails indicates their impact. If you don’t like your adjustments, a double-click on the slider returns it to the default settings. It’s also possible to apply additional effects by selecting the “Add Adjustment” option at the top of the right-hand column. There’s a good selection of options available and the thumbnail makes it easy to experiment, but a couple of basic controls – crop and straighten – are missing. However, we’re told that Photos app extension support is just a few days away at the time of writing and that will solve the issue.
In addition to making global adjustments, it’s also possible to paint in an effect using the controls revealed by clicking on the paintbrush icon to the right of each adjustment title. There’s an option to detect the edges in your image to limit the adjustment to specific areas, but we found this had mixed success. While the selective adjustment feature can be very useful, using it can get frustrating because you have to click on the brush icon twice every time you want to adjust the size, hardness or opacity of the adjustment brush, or switch to the eraser to correct a mistake. It’s also particularly annoying that if you change your mind about the treatment that you want to use and click on a different effect in the bottom row, your carefully crafted painting is lost.
the bottom line. It’s not perfect, butArtistry Photo Pro is easy to use and there are some powerful tools available. Angela Nicholson