Picturesque Review: Makeup For Your Images
Posted by Greg Healy on 05/5/07 in Graphics, Utilities
How many times during a week have you found yourself needing to “beautify†your pictures? Maybe you were working on a blog post, creating a brochure, or working on a newsletter. I know I have, and up until now, my only option was to leave my pictures the way the they were. For the most part, that meant they were a little plain.
There are a few applications that I’ve come across that suit the job of image “beautifierâ€, such as Photoshop. Though for most people, Photoshop is a great option if you can afford it, but there isn’t much sense in paying so much money only to use a few of the features. This is where Picturesque from Acqualia comes in.
Picturesque isn’t so much a picture editor, as much as a picture “beautifierâ€. Applying effects to your pictures is as easy as drag and drop. This application has come in handy a few times, in the short time that I’ve had it.
There are 3 ways that you can put an image into Picturesque. You can drop an image(s) onto the Picturesque window, drop an image(s) onto the Picturesque icon, or hit Command-O and find the image(s) you want to add. Once an image is dropped into Picturesque, you will notice that whatever effects you had applied to a previous image, are automatically added to the new image as a starting point. This is helpful in the way that you can add images over time and have them look unified as long as you don’t adjust any of the sliders each time.
When you add images into Picturesque, you will also notice a window called “Inspector†pop up. This is where the magic happens. The Inspector has 6 drop-down menus. One for Background, Reflection, Shadow & Glow, Curve, Edges and Resize.
In my time using Picturesque, I found myself using the Reflection, Shadow & Glow and Curve the most. It makes your photos and images stand out much more than if they were just left as is. With each section, there are also different ways to customize each effect. For example, under Reflection, you can adjust the Length, Opacity and Offset of the reflection.
After you spend your entire evening experimenting with the different effects (and you know you will), you will want to save those photos. When saving, you have 5 different formats that you can save as. Your choices are BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG and TIFF. Surely this selection will satisfy the formats that you use the most.
One of the features that I hinted at toward the top of the post, is Picturesque ability to handle multiple photos at once. When you add more than one image to Picturesque at one time, each gets it’s own window. As you can see in the screenshot, it says “MacApper - Image 1 of 3â€. To cycle through these images, you just have to click on the arrows in the bottom right corner. The window will automatically re-size so that you can see the entire image.
To give you an idea of some of the things Picturesque can do, check out this image of the MacApper Logo:
Picturesque definitely has the ability to produce the “wow†factor. When you show off your “beautified†photos, people will be impressed. Oh, and by the way, each image included in this post was sent through Picturesque before being uploaded. Picturesque is shareware and available for $19.50 from Acqualia Software.
Good job making it through this review! As a reward the kind folks at Acqualia software have agreed to give away 2 licenses to Picturesque. To win, leave a comment about how this application can, and will be useful to you. You might also leave a comment about how the tool can be improved. Good luck!
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+2 
Seriously, this thing is perfect as it is. It does what it needs to do well and in an easy-to-use way.
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