Create the ultimate photo toolkit

There’s no shortage of software to help you organise and edit digital photos.

Photoshop, now in its CS3 version, rates as the ultimate image-manipulation workshop, but we’re not all sufficiently well heeled to afford it – £570 is a substantial sum after all.

So alternatives must be found, which could take you an age to track down among the thousands of programs available.

To make life easier, we’ve done the hard work, sifting through hundreds of titles to present 50 excellent, low-cost, photo-related software tools. Naturally, there’s some cross-over of functionality between a number of our suggestions, and you probably won’t need (or want) to install every item listed.

However, rest assured you’ll find more than a few useful (and in some cases intriguing) programs to populate your personal photography toolkit. This list isn’t exhaustive, rather it is our pick of the best.

The emphasis here is squarely on saving you money, so more than half of our recommendations are freeware. However, even the shareware and commercial inclusions don’t cost much (the total cost to buy every product featured here is still less than the price of Photoshop CS3) and they do offer an awful lot. We’ve also highlighted the top 12 applications and given them more detailed coverage.

If you’ve bought the DVD edition of PCW, you’ll find most of these programs included in the ‘From the magazine’ section on the cover disc. A small selection is included on the CD edition. There’s some expert advice to help you add that professional touch to your photos, plus a couple of indispensable hardware suggestions. So dive in and get ready to transform your digital photo library.

ACDSee 9 Photo Manager
Price £24.99 www.acdsee.com
ACDSee 9 is targeted at those who want to sort their photos with minimal fuss. It’s an image organiser, tweaker and file-sharing suite that, while beginner-friendly, does have some powerful media management tools. Imported images can be categorised by embedded metadata – the info that the camera stores when a picture is taken. So, you can organise files by the date of the image, its size or even your own keywords.

There’s a number of optimisation gadgets to hand, including Shadow/Highlight, which is designed to optimise exposure, as well as a one-click red-eye function – always useful when dealing with flashlit portraits. This Vista-certified package incorporates a widget that will display sequences of images on the Desktop for relaxed review, while its Print Layout facilities take the pain out of producing multiple prints on A4 stock ready for sharing.

It’s not the most flexible photo asset management device, but it does allow for rapid organisation, optimisation and output. Also, investigate the Pro product, which totes many high-end features, such as Raw file conversion and colour profile support.

Arcsoft Photo Impression 6.5 Gold
Price $49.99 (£25.38) www.arcsoft.com/products/photoimpression
Photo Impression does impress with its feature set, especially given the price. The program has been updated recently and now includes intriguing colour-tinting tools to spice up mono images, color tone for further application of sepia and mono effects, as well as Picture Book, by which you can create electronic photo books with page-turning effects.

Extensive Raw support remains, as does a bunch of wizards that give you effective photo optimisation with just a few clicks, as well as manual devices for finer tuning.

Batch-processing functions are abundant, with the tedium of rotating multiple images reduced to one click, and Photo Impression supplies the option to rate images so you can quickly find your favourites. Photoshop snobs will doubtless turn up their noses, but you can’t argue with 48-bit image support (16 bits per colour channel), and you’ll also find the means to open other media files, such as video and audio, from within the application.

At the price, Arcsoft has a very capable and cost-effective tool for photo management. It’s a shame, as is so often the case, that there’s no Mac OSX support, but the software does feature many facilities that will make the life of the casual photographer so much easier.