I love to capture exotic birds in my camera. The Hebbal lake in Bangalore is my favorite spot for capturing these birds. In order to get the best image, I take multiple shots of these birds with different cameras. I was looking for an image editor in my notebook, which can support a wide variety of digital raw formats for finer editing. Fortunately, one of the fellow photographers I met at the lake told me about FastStone Image Viewer.

FastStone Image Viewer is a free user-friendly image editor that comes with an array of features such as converter, red eye removal, emailing and color adjustments. The interface of this utility tool resembles Windows Explorer, though it sometimes looks a bit cluttered. FastStone offers additional options of high quality magnifier and musical slideshow with more than 150 transitional effects. It supports most of the major graphic formats like BMP, JPEG, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, TIF and TGA. You can also import digital camera formats like CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RW2 and DNG in to FastStone.

It is needless to compare FastStone with high end apps like Adobe Photoshop. However, it has its own forte. If you are a shutterbug and needs to edit images on the move, FastStone may be an option. The interface is user-friendly and you can browse, edit and convert your images with ease.

In FastStone Image Viewer, you can edit images in two modes. In the ‘normal mode’ the entire window is divided into three parts. The directories of your files are located on the top left. The image you have chosen to edit will be displayed in the center pane and a preview window will appear in the bottom left of the screen. If you switch to full view, the picture will be displayed at the centre of the screen, allowing you to examine the entire picture closely.

In ‘full view’, options to tinker with the selected image will be displayed when you hover the mouse on the left hand side of the screen. When you hover the mouse on the top of the screen, the image directory will be displayed in the form of thumbnails, making image selection easier. On the right hand side it displays ‘file’ and ‘attribute’ options of the selected image. The bottom portion displays navigation and zooming options.

In FastStone, the images load faster unlike other image editors. This lets you edit a large number of pictures in no time. Although the image editing tools are fewer in FastStone Image Viewer, it makes up with its browsing features.

You might like the ‘Compare images’ option in the Image Viewer, which enables you to compare four images in one screen. So if you have taken a photograph with four different cameras, you can compare all the four shots in one single screen and select the best one.

The coolest feature in FastStone is the ‘Slide Show’. Using the’ Slide Show Builder’, you can sync great music and captivating images with 156 transition effects. When you create a slideshow a .exe file is created in your desktop, which will run the slideshow. FastStone also offers screen capture tools.

The latest version comes with ten skins to customize the look of the interface. Keeping global users in mind, the commands in FastStone can be displayed in seventeen different languages.

FastStone has done justice to its name as it can quickly enhance the quality of a slew of images in no time. Since FastStone has an easy to use interface and fast editing tools I can compare my edited photographs with fellow photographers with ease on my Samsung NC20.

Content syndicated from H2BM.