15-Minute Reviews :: SunlitGreen Photo Editor v1.1.0b942
Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is SunlitGreen Photo Editor version 1.1.0 build 942 by SunlitGreen.com – A photo-manipulation application for correcting color, crop, rotation and so forth.
Software Description
As Giveaway of the Day states:
“SunitGreen Photo Editor is a small, lightweight yet powerful photo enhancer and editor. It enables you to view, resize, rotate, apply color corrections and effects to your photos in an easy and professional way. Using the automatic color correction commands, your dim photos become sharp and clear with a simple click.
Advanced tools such as Levels and Curves enable you to fine-tune details and create spectacular effects. You can even save selections to separate alpha channels and then load them back!”
Quick Pros
- Interface is relatively easy to use
- Some of the tools allow for live preview
- Decent amount of color-correction tools
- Some blur and sharpen functionality
Quick Cons
- Auto-level isn’t vastly accurate
- No preview functionality in Open window
- Can not drag and drop entire folders
- Does not like PNG or TIFF files
- No batching functionality – Could benefit from a more lab-like process
Expansion
This application is built very simply; There isn’t too much to this application to complicate the process. When you launch the application for the first time you are greeted by a very simple window layout. There is the menu bar, and directly below that is a small toolbar with the most common functionality to this application. The remainder of the window is where your images land for editing. When you load up images, they open as smaller windows in this area and are relatively easy to get around. Going around the menus, the way menu items are worded and laid out gives somewhat the feeling of trying to be like Photoshop’s layout.
The application has some of the basic color correction and editing tools. There is levels (automatic and manual), curve, brightness/contrast (automatic and manual), hue/saturation and color balance as well as desaturation for color management. There is also cropping and resizing functionality (With some decent resampling filters as well) as well as blurring and sharpening tools. The toolset here isn’t great, but also doesn’t toss you dozens of options to get confused either. Overall, the tools do work decently for the actual editing process, though I would recommend steering away from the auto levels/auto contrast modes – Had quite a few images’ coloring come out odd, such as snow images always leaning toward green coloring, some dark images actually being turned darker and so forth.
There is quite a few shortcomings in this application that hopefully mature in the future. There is no preview functionality in the Open window, so you may find yourself using the drag and drop functionality more often than the Open dialog. While you can open and drag and drop multiple files at a time, you can not drag and drop an entire folder or folder structure to edit.
As well, there is limited file support. The only file types this application supports is BMP, ICO, GIF and JPG. There is no PNG or TIFF functionality or other formats to support your editing functionality.
As since this application is clearly geared towards cropping, color correction and minor tweaks such as blur and sharpen, it would have made much more sense to have laid this application out in a logical batching format for quick editing files. Speed is lacking in this application, even with keyboard shortcuts and editing more than a handful of images with this application would become very daunting. Batching functionality would have added, and with the tools offered, most could have been able to be placed on-screen at the same time for rapid modifications.
Final Verdict
While the application does as advertised pretty much, it really isn’t greatly productive and doesn’t offer much in the way of tools besides basic tools. It does have its merits however, and doesn’t overwhelm you with tools you might not need for color correction or cropping. For free, you may want to give this a try for a little more control over your color correction, but don’t expect too much. As for paying $29.95 for this title, I couldn’t recommend it either way; It’s just too weak for what is offered. If it turned into a lab-like batching tool, it could definitely be worth the price, but it feels essentially like a stripped-down graphics editor. For those of you who are on a budget (Read: Can’t afford Photoshop), there are alternatives. Paint.NET as well as GIMP – Both are free alternatives and handle more like what one may expect from a paint/photo application.
Posted by BladedThoth on Monday, December 24, 2007
