Charles Moore Reviews Portraits & Prints PRO 2.2
Portraits & Prints from Econ Technologies is an interesting little application for basic editing, correcting, and particularly printing digital images, especially targeted at users who want an easy-to-use, easy-to-learn tool that doesn’t overwhelm them with overkill and featuritis. Portraits & Prints allows you to enhance, export and print your digital photographs yielding high quality photos rivaling those from a film lab. In addition to all that the Portraits & Prints Standard Edition has to offer, Portraits & Prints Pro Edition allows you to create, edit, and save custom templates. You can design your own templates so that you may have any printing layout you would like.
A Photoshop challenger Portraits & Prints is not; nor does it purport to be. Neither is it really an alternative to Apple’s iPhoto. There is some feature crossover with both of these much more expensive programs, but Portraits & Prints is really complimentary to rather than competitive with them.
Portraits & Prints allows you to enhance each photo by:
- sharpening image quality
- rotating
- cropping
- reducing red eye
- using captions
- adding masks
- boosting saturation
- adjusting brightness
- adjusting contrast
I reviewed Portraits & Prints version 2.0 here in December, 2004,, but since then the application has been upgraded to version 2.2 including Universal Binary support and several other new features that include:
• Now supports GyazMail.
• Improved precision and control over editing objects in the Template Editor.
• Graphic objects in the Template Editor may now be freely exchanged with other applications.
• Improved masking of photo cell objects.
• Added a contextual menu with numerous actions when clicking on laid out photos in a template.
• Crop constraints & presets are now saved on a per-photo basis in the catalog.
• Added keyboard equivalents for some common tasks.
• The current template is now designated in the Template Manager and Template Selector sheet windows.
• All-new online help.
• Numerous bug fixes.
With Portraits & Prints 2.2, you can enhance photos, select a template, and then export or print the template. You can automatically add images to a template or manually place them. With hundreds of templates to choose from, you can print your photo in many different ways.
It is important to note that Portraits & Prints only stores links to the original files. All changes and modifications made to photos will never modify the original photo files. This is a powerful feature since you won’t have to worry about inadvertently damaging the original photo by cropping it incorrectly or enhancing the photo too much.
Portraits & Prints uses a document based interface, which means that all your configuration settings as well as specific information about each photo are contained in a single catalog document, which is, basically, a collection of photos. This catalog document may be saved anywhere on your computer’s hard disk. A Catalog is a double-clickable document that displays thumbnails of the photos that you want to print. It is not a photo organizer like iPhoto, it simply links to the photos you add. Photos can be added from iPhoto, a folder, a CD, a website, or anywhere. You can add one photo or hundreds. You can create as many catalogs as you want and save the catalogs for future use. Brightness, contrast, sharpness, saturation, red-eye, balloon-caption, rotation, and cropping tools are available. Any enhancements made to photos are stored within the catalog and applied to the image when it is printed so the original photo is left untouched.
A Portraits & Prints catalog document can be opened at a later date by simply double-clicking it from the Finder. This differs from an application based interface where only a single set of data and options are presented. A word processing program is an example of a document based interface, because each document you create can be saved as a separate file. Conversely, Apple’s iPhoto is an example of an application based interface, because only a single library of photos is managed and the user cannot open or save different libraries. Once you configure a Portraits & Prints catalog document and add your desired photos, you’re basically done - all your settings are stored within the catalog document. You can then open the saved catalog document at any time, view it, then quit Portraits & Prints. If you desire, you can make changes to your Portraits & Prints catalog document. All changes will be saved.
Portraits and Prints can be used synergistically with iPhoto by selecting images or albums in iPhoto and dragging them into Portraits & Prints to print them. You can export, email or save any image modifications made in Portraits & Prints directly into iPhoto. You can find more information on using Portraits & Prints with iPhoto here:
http://www.econtechnologies.com/site/Pages/Portraits_Prints/pnp_tips.html
Portraits & Prints’ interface consists of two different views - the Photograph and Layout view. To change to a different view, use the respective buttons located near the top of the window. You will notice that as the view changes, the toolbar for each view changes as well. Each view has a different set of toolbar options that only apply to that particular view.
The Photograph view shows a single photo from the catalog in the preview window. To change the photo being viewed, highlight the desired photo in the pop-out Drawer. In Photograph view, editing features such as red-eye reduction, balloon captions, enhancements, and cropping can executed.
Portraits & Prints also integrates with OS X Image Capture. With Image Capture you can choose to have downloads of pictures from your digital camera added directly to a new Portraits & Prints catalog (see below) by selecting “Open in Portraits & Prints� from the Automatic Task popup. For a tutorial on this process
visit here.
Note: If you CONTROL(RIGHT)-CLICK on a selected photo in the Drawer, you will get a contextual menu similar to the Gear menu mentioned above.
http://www7a.biglobe.ne.jp/~ogihara/software/OSX/toyv-eng.html
Portraits & Prints templates provide basic printing formats that output prints in standard photo sizes, and include cropping and image size adjusting tools, giving you three options - retain aspect ratio, retain aspect ratio and crop, or for the advanced user, ignore aspect ratio. A template is a page layout where the photo’s size and position are preset. All you do is select your photos and print. It could be a 8.5x11 page with three 4x6 photos or it could be an elaborate Christmas photo card.
You can choose to automatically place one photo after another on a template or place one photo multiple times per template. With these options you do nothing but select the template and then the photos are automatically added. If you want to print only certain photos then you can just drag the photos you want directly onto the templates. Portraits & Prints is the slickest tool I’ve run across for not only facilitating these tasks, but making them easy and fun.
