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Software Reviews: Picasa and Coral Painter
Picasa
Picasa is a basic but flashy digital photo organizer and editor. Picasa is fine for casual digital shooters who just want to find all their pictures, sort them into albums, do quick edits, and share with friends and family. Pros and more serious photographers should look elsewhere.
This piece of software in particular is free to download and use subject to a disclaimer of course. Picasa has many automatic features that are ok for the beginner photo editor but the experianced editor will find that he/she has to undo alot of the things that picasa trys to do for him/her. Some things Picasa does well is it provides good red-eye removal, quick fixes and effects, and web sharing options. Although its editing information is sorted in INI files, making all edits reversible without saving multiple versions, it litters your computers folders with picasa.ini files. The edits are not displayed outside of Picasa, and there is no way to edit a photos embedded data. It also ties you to a folder-based system of organization that is not hierarchical. This being said it is a handy tool for any beginner, and is free, so its a good place to start editing photos, but experianced users should look into another type of photo editing software such as Adobe photo shop cs or Jasc paint shop pro.
Coral Painter
Coral painter (part of coral photo software)is a wonderful and powerful tool that every serious photo editor, graphic designer or painter should check out. This piece of software in particular has a load of features that allow you to edit all types of photos, images, and allow you to create images, graphics, realistic paintings and so much more. Coral painter allows you to mimic painting and drawing with chalk, pastels, watercolors, oils, crayons, pencil, felt pens, ink and alot more. Perspective grids to aid drawing 3-D images. It also features great watercolor techology to simulate realistic water color paintings. It comes with choice of paper textures, customizable work station layouts and custom keyboard shortcuts. It also features a mixer pallette that allows you to mix paint interactively and your choice of brushes(over 100) and also over 20 mediums with the ability to customize or create new brushs gives endless possiblities. Some paint brush mediums include; Tinting, watercolor, photo, sponges, sumi-e, pencils, pens, patterns, digital watercolor, colored pencils, charcoal, cloners, chalks, calligraphy pens, acrylics, airbrushers, artists oils, impasto brushes for thick dimensinal paint that builds up texture and much more. Its brush tracker pallet enables the user to browse the last 30 brushes used and keep track of the colors used with them. Now if this isnt enough it effects filters and plugins for correcting color, retouching images, and adding special effects could top it all off, not to mention its PSD file compatability, which is great for people who also use Adobe Photoshop.
Overall Coral painter is perfect for anyone, its tutorials will teach beginners and its advanced tools will keep the experianced busy. All this greatness comes at a price. To find this price, try searching for Coral painter in our directory, and clicking on the link. If you still cant find it, try searching for it in a popular search engine, or asking about it on our forums. Coral painter is probaly worth the coin, so its also worth checking into.
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