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

To get a bigger screen shot at 1:1 scale
Click here for a compressed jpg of 20 to 60 kB
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Screen shot with EXIF information

The pros:

Zoner Photo Studio displays the size in pixels of the photo you are working on.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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:

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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