The number of photo enhancement apps continues to grow in number and improve in capability. Here’s the story of a Mac photo app that’s easy to use to improve and enhance photos, but comes with a price beyond the price.
The app is called Photo Studio and the claim to fame is automatic photo enhancements. Well, not completely automatic. You need to drop in the photo, select the type of adjustments to make, but the process is quick, simple, and yields good results with minimal effort.
Open a photo to enhance, and let Photo Studio do the work.
Photo Studio is a good way to get quick improvements on a bunch of photos in batch processing mode, though each photo can be adjusted manually for more creative changes, or simply to tweak the automated changes.
The effects and filters are mostly the same as built-in to OS X, so Photo Studio blazes new ground only during the automated and batch settings.
The manual tools are simple enough to learn, so tweaking a photo- even one already enhanced in the automated mode- can be done in seconds. The problem lies more in knowing what to tweak and when, and that brings me to the major issues with what should be a decent and useful photo app.
Where are the app’s instructions and examples? They don’t exist. At almost $10, Photo Studio needs a free trial version so Mac users can sample how the app works (even if there’s no way to learn other than trial and error).
Overall, despite Photo Studio being attractive, and yielding good results with minimal effort, it suffers because there’s no trial, no instructions, and the developer’s website is a Facebook page.
That’s not good enough. The competition among photo apps for the Mac is intense, and many apps do more and cost less, including these two, and this one, and these three.