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Zoner Photo Studio

My personal pros and cons list


Zoner Photo Studio is a user friendly photo viewer, album and photo editor that let you edit some EXIF tags.  It is the successor of Zoner Media Explorer.

Many new features have been added.  Actually, most of the functions I was missing in Zoner Media Explorer are now implemented in Zoner Photo Studio 7.  Therefore it became bigger and I tended to grind my teeth when I saw the size of Zoner Photo Studio 7.  It is always my fear to see the size of software packages get out of control when they are seriously improved.  Let's say that it is still consistently smaller than some very big monsters out there.

Below the screen shots, I will tell you what I found to be convenient and what I was missing.

Screen shot with image preview
Zoner Photo Studio screen shot
To get a bigger screen shot at 1:1 scale
Click here for a compressed jpg of 20 to 60 kB
Click here for a high quality png of 100 to 400 kB
The png image may take up to 1 minute to appear on your screen.

Screen shot with EXIF information
Zoner Photo Studio screen shot
To get a bigger screen shot at 1:1 scale
Click here for a compressed jpg of 20 to 60 kB
Click here for a high quality png of 100 to 400 kB
The png image may take up to 1 minute to appear on your screen.

The pros:
  bullet  Zoner Photo Studio displays the size in pixels of the photo you are working on.

bullet  Zoner Photo Studio tells you the zoom factor of what you see on the screen.
Remember? these 2 are my fad!

bullet  Zoner Photo Studio has a very convenient acquire menu  to read memory cards from a card reader and copy the photos you choose to your hard disk drive.

bullet  The size of the thumbnails you see when you browse through the folders is customizable.

bullet  With Zoner Photo Studio you can rotate photos by any angle with antialiasing.

bullet  Zoner Photo Studio has a very convenient tool to correct sloped horizons.

bullet  Zoner Photo Studio has a very convenient Select and Crop tool.

bullet  Zoner Photo Studio keeps and even corrects and repairs the EXIF data.  Zoner Media explorer did loose the EXIF maker notes.  Zoner Photo Studio 7 has a check box in the settings where you can choose to keep the maker notes.

bullet  Zoner Photo Studio offers many choices for exposure enhancement and image enhancement.

bullet  Zoner Photo Studio pre-calculates -and displays- the file size you will get when you save an image as a compressed jpeg.  It also shows a preview.

bullet  Zoner Photo Studio displays thumbnails quickly even if there are 100's of photos in the folder.

bullet  Great addition: Zoner Photo Studio offers levels correction based on an histogram with a manual and an auto mode.  The best way by far (in my opinion) to correct brightness and contrast of photos.  This is one of the features I was really missing with the former Zoner Media Explorer.

bullet  Zoner Photo Studio does not offer white balance correction (or color shift) based on an histogram,  but its auto white balance correction under "enhance exposure" (CTRL-3) is better than auto white balance of other programs.  Additionally you can use the "adjust color temperature" (CTRL-2) in manual or auto mode.

bullet  Zoner Photo Studio let you print or export contact sheets with the EXIf data of your photos.

This is by far not an exhaustive list of Zoner Photo Studio's features, but rather a quick summary of functions I found most useful.



The cons:
  bullet  Zoner Photo Studio does not support Photoshop plugins.  If ever they add this, I hope it will not terribly blow up the size of the software,  else it may be better to leave it without plugin support.


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