PhotoEffects - a Fast Image Effects App for Mac

PhotoEffects (or Simple Photo Editor 2.0), is an interesting application billed as "a simple photo editor," and although that's a bit misleading, it does have a nice set of features.

First, my confusion with the name. If you look at its entry in the Apple list of products, this application is called Simple Photo Editor, and that's what it's called on the Pointless Programmers website. However, once you download and install the program, the only new application you'll see is called PhotoEffects, which in my mind is actually the more accurate name.

Because PhotoEffects (as I'll call it for the rest of this review), doesn't actually allow you to edit your images. You can't crop them, rotate them, or any of what I would consider to be common editing, although you can resize the image. But as far as applying Quartz Composition Filters, then PhotoEffects is a pretty good program. Just don't go into it thinking you're somehow finding a free Photoshop replacement.

Now, using PhotoEffects, I have to admit, is a little strange. Open up the program and you won't see any interface to speak of. You'll be shown, instead, a file picker. From this, pick the image or photo you want to tweak. After selecting you're image, you'll be shown the PhotoEffects interface, except what appears to be a preview image... isn't your image at all. In my mind, this is the first big mistake PhotoEffects makes. I must have played around with this for a while before I realized that, indeed, my image was actually being worked on!

So, you've selected your image and you have the interface. Click on the pop-up menu, and you'll see a list of 41 different effects you can apply to your image. These effects include pixellation, sepia tone, black & white, resizing, adding a fish eye or motion blur effect, sharpen, and more. Some of the effects will have preferences for you (how much blur? how sharp?), while others will not. When you've selected your effect (you can only do one at a time), hit the Continue button.

Don't be worried when PhotoEffects disappears; that's normal. A red icon in your Menu Bar will spin for a bit, and the change is applied. PhotoEffects quits and your newly-tweaked image appears in Preview (or your default image viewing application). That's it! If you want to apply more effects to the same image, simply go through the process again.

A couple things to note:

First is that your original image is left untouched. In fact, before any changes are made, PhotoEffects actually places a copy of your original on your Desktop. It's this copy that PhotoEffects works on and this copy which is altered.

Second is that all of this is made possible thanks to a great Mac OS X technology called Automator. Automator is sort of a scripting language that allows the user to set up workflows that perform a specific set of tasks on an item. What PhotoEffects does is set up those workflows - in this case 41 of them - and then applies them, with your preferences, to whatever image you selected. It's a nice way of doing things, and works quite well, although the interface is still a bit awkward.

And that's it! PhotoEffects is definitely a one-trick pony (or maybe in this case it's a 41-trick pony), but it really does what it claims to do quite well. As I've mentioned, it doesn't have the easiest interface to get used to, and I'd probably only recommend using PhotoEffects if you don't want to install a Quartz Effects plugin to your existing image editor, but for quick and dirty effects, PhotoEffects is pretty good. It's completely free, and you can download your copy at the Pointless Programmers website.