PhotoFiltre Editor's Review

Give your digital photos the professional touch with this must have Windows graphics app.

I've said this a couple of times now, but it's very true – with the Holidays come and gone, you've probably taken quite a number of digital photos that you'd like to do something really cool with. I see it nearly every year. Post-holiday sales of graphic apps are generally very good for one reason: people want to retouch their photos and give them a professional touch. This is why I really like applications like PhotoFiltre. It’s a prosumer photo retouching application for Windows.

PhotoFiltre allows you to do simple or advanced adjustments to an image and apply a vast range of filters to it. It's simple and intuitive to use; and has a shallow learning curve. Its toolbar gives you access to the standard filters with just a few clicks. It also gives the application itself, a robust look.

PhotoFiltre has a wide range of filters, allowing novice users to familiarize themselves with the world of graphics. You can find the standard adjustment functions – brightness, contrast, dyed, saturation, gamma correction – and its artistic filters – watercolor, pastels, Indian ink, pointillism, puzzle effect via both toolbars and menus. The application has more than 100 different filters.

PhotoFiltre uses both automatic and lasso/polygon vectored selection methods to select objects and photo elements. Both allow you to select a customized form by drawing a shape by hand or using a series of lines. Every selection can be saved into a separate file, to be used later on.

You can further enhance your photos with PhotoMasque.  You can create advanced contour and transparency effects on your images by using preset masks. PhotoFiltre's masks are gray scale images, where white is the transparency color.  Opacity increases as the shades of gray become darker. Black is completely opaque. PhotoMasque comes with several basic masks to inspire you to create your own.

Pros: Small, easy to learn and use.

Cons: Additional filters and masks would be a nice to have.

Conclusion: PhotoFiltre is a great application, especially for its price.  It's small, easy to use and quick, especially on machines with a bit of punch to them.  The only real downside to the app, if you can call it that, is that it might be nice to have more filters and masks with the application. While you can create your own, most users probably won't with this entry level application.