FastStone Image Viewer 3.5 Review
Hi, I’m Michael Topham, technical writer for Digital Photo. Welcome to this Photo Answers video lesson, where we’re gonna take a look into the latest Faststone image viewer version 3.5. it’s an image browser, converter and editor, all rolled into one and benefits from a nice rare features that we will explore. Faststone is a free software that can be downloaded from the internet, and it’s aimed to windows users who maybe looking for a cheap alternative to the more expensive editing software packages on the market. It can also support all major graphic formats, including BMP, JPEG, PNG, and TIF, and it will also read all your raw files, supporting Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Fuji, Minolta, Olympus, and Sony. I’ve opened up the software on a laptop that’s running with windows XP. This is the main navigational page that you come across straight away. But don’t be put off by all these options that we are looking at on the screen. Let’s just take a bit of time to have a look around in the general screen and become familiar with the new layout. Something that can take a bit of time no matter what the new software you may be operating. Starting on the top left of the screen, we can have a look at the menu bar. Under File, we have all the usual options, including Open, Save As, and Print. Under Edit, we’re given a selection of adjustment options that we will look into once we’ve open up an image. Faststone gives us a good number of viewing modes under the View in the menu bar. Going down to the Zoom, notice the extensive number of zoom percentages that were on offer. Heading back into the menu bar, let’s take a look into Create. Under Create, we’re given four different builders to choose from, including a contact sheet builder that could be great in gathering all your pics together onto one page in small thumbnails. Just taking a brief look shows the amount of detail that they offers to user, and there’s nice preview selected to you just simply by clicking on this button here, Preview, and that shows you the general overall contact print before you actually go down and create it. Going across further still on the menu bar, we come to Tools, the Batch Convert option lets us convert our raw files. To do this, you simply select where your raw files are place and drag them across into this input list and then choose your output format from the list here, either a TIF or a JPEG, and then you simply click on the Start, and that will run through your raws and convert them for you. If in any stage you become unfamiliar with anything on the software, just head to Help on the menu bar and download the Tutorial. With the menu bar covered, let’s explore some of the rest of this navigational page. Starting on the left, we have our main folder finder list. Find your appropriate folder or hard drive that stores your images and then this will load them up as thumbnails on the right hand side. Now that we’re done with our main folder finder list, we can move this slider back up top, this gives us bigger preview, and if we move this slider to the right hand side, it give us an even bigger preview. If at any time you want to hide this preview box, just simply click here. With all my thumbnails neatly collected here on the right hand side, I’m just gonna scroll down a pick out the photograph I want to work on. By holding down my mouse on the preview image, brings out the image at 100 percent, and we can scroll around the image, checking the focus on different areas and then releasing with the mouse, takes us back to the overall picture. Time now to double click on this preview image and the program loads it up into its full screen mode. Moving the mouse to the very top of your screen brings out a thumbnail task bar, and if you have a wheel on your mouse, you can just scroll through the folder and click on a different thumbnail, and this will load it up in this full screen mode. Coming off there and moving the mouse to the left of the screen brings up your main options, including adjustments and effects. Now there’s plenty in here for you to explore, but I’m just gonna make a few simple adjustments. Going into enhance color, just increase the brightness of this photograph, and the contrast, and a bit of the gamma, moving across to the hue and the saturation, making a few little adjustments, click Ok when you're happy with those, and those adjustments have been made to your image. Moving back across to the left again, I’m just gonna sharpen the image slightly, by clicking on Sharpen. This loads the photograph a hundred percent and we can move through the image. I’m gonna increase the sharpness with this slider. Click Ok when you’re happy with that. So now that we’ve made few little adjustments, we wanna go back to our preview mode. To do this, just go to the center of the image and double click. Now with the image back into our preview mode, with all the adjustments we’ve made in our full screen mode, I suggest that you save it, so to do this, let’s go to File and down to Save As, give it a new name. Just taking a look at the rest of this navigational screen, we’re given options to skip through your images and then image zoom ratio, by clicking on this Zoom in button, and holding down your Control on your keyboard, and you can use scroll on your mouse, you can easily zoom in and out of your image. That’s rather smart. There’s an extensive resize and resample tool that you can play with to make your images larger or smaller, and in the Crop tool, to crop your image. I’m gonna go to a paper ratio of 7 by 4 inches, kind of a more panoramic letter box style of crop, move that down slightly. I’m happy with something like that, so just click on Crop when you're happy. And we’re finally given a few different options, such as adding images and reduce images size to emails by simply clicking here and options to print, just by clicking on this button. So on overview, this Faststone image viewer version 3.5 has stunned with its fast and user friendly image browser, quick and simple raw converter and well laid out editing options. There are plenty more features to get experimenting with, so why not give it a go by logging on to www.faststone.org, and download the software for free. There’s also a donation page for those who just want to give a small amount to the creators of this superb editing software. I hope you’ve enjoyed this video insight into Faststone image viewer, and I look forward to seeing you again soon.