Picturesque Review: Makeup For Your Images
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!
I’d like a free copy of Picturesque. I create web designs and am currently working on a new website. This program would make it much easier to add in new images that look great.
Also, a little bug/feature request: If I finish editing a picture and then close the main window, clicking the application icon in the dock doesn’t reopen it. I have to go to Window > Main Window.
What would I do with a Picturesque license? The possibilities are endless with this great program according to your description Picturesque can be very helpful for on-the-fly editing. As a hobby, I photo edit. I own a copy of Photoshop Elements but do not use it much due to the fact that it take almost forever to actually load. With Picturesque, I would have an easy way to edit my photos for the internet and other places with out wasting half my life waiting for the program to open.
Now all I have to do is cross my fingers.
WIth Picturesque I could make the tedious task of making small edits to multiple images using photoshop much simpler!
Picturesque looks really cool. It’d be nice to make unified images really quickly. The pics looked good. Nice job.
Looks like a really nice tool, but does anybody know, if it’s also possible to add the reflection for example on the right side? Or is this effect only possible below the image?
It’s great as a quick edit tool (I have Photoshop), beautifier, good place to play around with different effects and find inspiration.
A few improvement suggestions:
One thing I missed right away was the ability to crop images, absolutely indispensable; if I don’t do it in this application I’m going to do it in another one, and it would greatly improve the workflow if I could do it all in this one app.
Slightly more detailed control would be great; for instance, Curve and Edges: Fade I would like to have a slider for each corner/edge so I can make them have different values.
An awesome addition to this app would be a “Presets” window where you can save preset combinations of settings that you use often.
Also, the ability to control the level of zoom when viewing the image would be nice.
The handling of multiple images is nice, but I would like to see another floating window (or something) listing all images that are open which would allow me to close just one image if I needed to (because I don’t want to process it).
There’s a lot more you could do to it, but it’s a great little app already; and I love the UI.
If I had a copy of Picturesque I could use it to add great looking pictures to my posts on my blog. I think it would work great for that.
I won a copy thanks to Glenn Wolsey, and after trying it for a while I do like it but there are some things that need to be fixed. One of the things that bugs me is when you have multiple photos open in the app, the settings in the Inspecter apply to every photo that is open, instead of each one having the settings applied to it saved so you can go back and edit it later.
I would use Picturesque to make thumbnail images and other teasers for a variety of websites I work on including my blog and several other professional websites. I would also use it to make quick edits to images that I use on cards and the like.
As far as how it could be improved I would say that presets would be really helpful. Batch processing is nice but for things like blogs it would be easier to just save a preset. Then that preset could just be opened for each entry’s image and applied.
Also an image “enhancement” hud would be nice.This would function just like the one in iWeb and iPhoto and allow you to quickly adjust the exposure, levels, white balance ect.
Picturesque would work wonders for me. I’m not a Adobe Photoshop guru by any means, and often I find myself frustrated when trying to “enhance” or “beautify” my pictures. At the same time I don’t have enough time browsing the interweb and reading tutorials, since I work and go to school. Picturesque makes editing your photos and image files a breeze, and it’s fun too! I can pimp out an image in 2 minutes. How cool is that!?! A free license would be totally awesome! =)
I would love a free license for Picturesque to save some time editing my photos while in my wheelchair. Using the alternative app’s takes me much longer to edit my photos and I only can be off my respirator for 30 minutes at a time. Picturesque would give me so additional minutes of computer use, my only connection to the outside world.
Thanks in advance for considering giving me a license.
BTW: Picturesque beats the pants off Imagewell!
What Would I Use Picturesque for? My Blog Of course. I find it awkward to use photoshop (et al) to go through pictures for one blog post and do all of it manaully.
Thanks for the opportunity to win!
This pp looks like it would save me time editing images for my blog. Not too shabby.
Picturesque does one single thing well. It speeds up and makes my basic post photo processing more efficient.
However, in the short span that I have used picturesque (I already purchased a license), I have run into quite a few bugs.
#1. The background color never seems to work right. There have been times that I edited a picture, and it comes out with the wrong background, JUST the background color, or the background color isn’t applied to the image right when you do something like the curves.
#2. When you turn off the option to add the background color to the image, saving an image as a jpeg just defaults to a white bg? Why? I can understand if you had the ability to build transparency into an image why you wouldn’t want to save the background color…but a jpg? It should ALWAYS save the background color by default.
#3. Resizing an image is a pain. You do it only through the slider interface, and by percentages…meaning, you can never get it exactly right unless you are lucky. There is no way to input the EXACT size you want it to be. I had to resort back to ImageWell to make this change, and import it back into Picturesque.
#4. There is no crop option, which is inexcusable in this application.
#5. There should be far more control per corner for the image enhancements, and for the mirroring etc.
This is what I have come across thus far, but overall, it is a good start. The ability to easily add roiunded corners is indispensable in itself. Doing that nonsense in Photoshop always made me cringe.
I am new to webdesign and graphic manipulation and I would really appreciate the ease of use that Picturesque offers. The abality to add reflection and curved corners and VERY nice because I haven’t yet learned how to do this in Photoshop and would love it if I didn’t have to learn.
It would save me about $600 dollars worth of PhotoShop money or about $5,000+ of legal costs from being sued by Adobe for pirating PhotoShop. That’s a really big saving!
I’d love to have a copy of Picturesque to use for touching up some pictures I have sitting around that need a bit more snazz. As for improvements, how about AI that will retouch everything for you?
Seriously, this thing is perfect as it is. It does what it needs to do well and in an easy-to-use way.
Looks like a great app. I work for a church and we have an extremely minimal budget. I could really use this app. Thanks for considering.
This tool would make editing my portfolio so much easier. I could beautify my thumbnails with ease and get my portfolio streamlined for new clients to look at!
Not to mention the money I will save on Photoshop…
[...] in the week I reviewed Picturesque, and many of you kind people participated in the giveaway by leaving a comment. After many hours of [...]
Everyone likes free software!
I can definitely see myself using this to post images online. As for how to improve it…hard to say, I’d have to use it first
[...] the makers of Picturesque, Soulver comes a very simple and intuitive user interface. You type whatever you want to find on [...]
Saw it, tried it, loved it bought it. 5/5 for speed, simplicity, interface. Does what is says on the packet.
[...] but there are two things I really miss. The first one is a small integrated utility, ala Picturesque, that would make it possible to create variants of icons just by adding a couple of effects on the [...]
have to test it, hope it is good
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[...] application that received quite a considerable update is Picturesque, from Acqualia. I reviewed Picturesque v1.0 way back in May of 2007, and with this update, you won’t even recognize Picturesque anymore. The [...]
[...] application that received quite a considerable update is Picturesque, from Acqualia. I reviewed Picturesque v1.0 way back in May of 2007, and with this update, you won’t even recognize Picturesque anymore. The [...]
[...] application that received quite a considerable update is Picturesque, from Acqualia. I reviewed Picturesque v1.0 way back in May of 2007, and with this update, you won’t even recognize Picturesque anymore. The [...]