Photo Studio 14 comes in three versions and there is a free one with slightly fewer features, a $34.99 Home Edition and a $69.99 Pro Edition. I downloaded the freebie and found it to be packed with useful features. It was last updated about three months ago, so it's still fairly new.
It performs three tasks and there is an organiser/manager, a viewer and an editor. The organiser enables you to browse your photos and a folder tree is displayed in a pane on the left, and thumbnail images are displayed in a pane in the centre. You can assign keywords to photos, add titles and descriptions and everything you would expect from a photo manager.
An unusual feature is the ability to add audio notes to photos. You can assign an audio file from disk or record audio directly and attach it to a photo. Many photo managers read the GPS data embedded within photos these days, but Photo Studio also lets you set the location a photo was taken using Google Earth or view the location in Google Earth. You have to have Google Earth installed on your PC of course. You can filter your photos by location and it's possible to select a position on a Google map and then display all the photos taken within a certain distance. That's quite clever.
Another clever feature is the ability to create 3D photos. You take two photos with your camera moving the camera sideways a couple of inches - about the distance between your eyes. Photo Studio then analyses the two images and creates a 3D image from them. You view the image with those cardboard glasses with red and blue plastic lenses. It's a bit of fun.
Photo Studio will stitch together photos to create panoramic images too. You select two or more images and then start a wizard. It asks you to put them in order and then it automatically stitches them together. It's much easier than doing it manually in a photo editor.
The software enables you to view photos and it can turn them into slide shows. There are special effects when new photos appear on the screen, you can add music and more. The photo editing capabilities are excellent for a free photo manager and there is a wide range of tools and special effects. The effects include grayscale, old photograph, explosion, oil paint, waves, pencil drawing, pixelise, emboss, texture, fading borders and more. The tools include crop, morphing mesh, align horizon, red-eye reduction, clone stamp and several more. The colours, levels and colour temperature can be adjusted, there is sharpen and blur and so on.
Photos can be uploaded to Facebook, Flickr and Picasa albums, turned into slide shows, wallpaper and calendars, and more. There is too much in Photo Studio 14 to cover here and you should at least download the free version.
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