Home Photo Studio 7.0

Home Photo Studio puts together a simple photo editor and a number of more complex and pro-like image enhancing tools into a single easy-to-use package. From easy contrast and lighting settings to frames, greeting cards, and slideshows, this full-featured application covers a wide range of retouching, enhancing, and correction tools, for both individual and batch image processing.

Editing your pictures is simple and rewarding. Most effects are applied with just one click of your mouse, though the program offers also a number of brushes and highly-configurable enhancing and retouching tools. You can improve the appearance of a portrait by removing all those skin blemishes, add snow or lightning effects to your best images, frame them or create customizable greeting cards and collages with them, or even give them a three-dimensional touch in just a few seconds. The results are shown immediately and any improvement applied can be rolled back just as easily. All changes can be applied to each picture individually or to a folder full of photographs in one single operation.

Among the most complex processes available, I would highlight the possibility of cutting out a section of a photo in order to change its background, the tilt-shift miniature effect, the slideshow creator, and the photo collage utility. Some of these functions, which may require more than just a couple of mouse clicks, come with their own wizard. Thus, you will find specific instructions to change the background of a photo, add a “miniature” (or tilt-shifting) effect, straighten the horizon of your landscapes, add a pseudo-HDR effect, or to remove red eyes from your portraits. All you need to do is follow the instructions and watch the video tutorial provided for further detail.

Home Photo Studio comes in three different flavors, each with a different degree of sophistication and different levels of functionality and price. The Standard edition includes the basic image-editing toolkit, photo enhancement features, and a number of greeting cards and frames to embellish your images. The Deluxe and Gold versions offer a series of more sophisticated editing process, such as the 3D compositions, the photo collage creation, and the change background option. The demo available in the program’s homepage will allow you to try most of these functions and features for yourself, so that you can decide which better fits your needs. Whichever version you decide upon, Home Photo Studio is a tool worth trying – it may lack the complex settings and features of other similar tools, but many not-so-savvy users may see this limitation as an advantage.