DeutschZoner Photo Studio Tools
Zoner Photo Studio offers two basic types of tools for making edits and adding effects to photos: direct tools, where you make the edit in the Editor window directly, and tools with "filter windows."
Direct Tools
Direct tools are ones where you use visual controls, at full resolution, to affect how the picture will look. The changes are applied to the picture immediately or after an Apply button or similar button is clicked. Among the direct tools are:
- tools for editing tumbling lines and perspective
- retouching tools: red eye reduction, clone stamp, iron, paintbrush, effect brush, fill
- the gradient filter tool*
- direct pasting of text or an image into a picture
- selecting a part of a picture
The direct tools are designed to be easy and intuitive to use, and to give results as simply and quickly as possible. Work with them is in real time and at a zoom level of the user's choice.
*) The phrase "Gradient Filter" is derived from the existing terminology for physical gradient filters used in front of camera lenses; they are not the same as the filter window described below.
Filters
The vast majority of tools both for editing pictures and for applying effects, envelopes, etc., in Zoner Photo Studio is offered via "filter windows." Each filter window offers a before and after preview of the picture. Normally preview updates are automatic, but you can turn this behavior off to accommodate older PCs. Previews can have a variety of appearances. The window overall is resizable. Thus there is no need to work with tiny previews if you don't want to. Most window settings can be saved as presets for later re-use. You can highlight blowout and underexposure in previews, or show the current histogram.
Filter windows can be chained together (the Batch Filter) and/or - when called from the Browser - applied to many photos at once. This is in fact why two of the direct tools - the text and image pasting tools - have their equivalents in the filter windows.
Even though the filter windows are resizable and they can offer quite large preview panes when stretched all the way out, sometimes using the Editor window at full resolution for previewing will give a more useful preview of results. Today's computers provide enough processing power for this method of work. Thus Zoner Photo Studio offers the option of switching any of the filter windows into a mode that uses the main Editor window for previewing. However, because the filter window itself takes up some space of its own, this option will be most appreciated by those who own two monitors.
Blowout and Underexposure
The ability to identify "blowout," that is, of places where one of a picture's color channels has reached the highest possible brightness level, leading to areas all with the same brightness in at least one channel and thus with lost detail, is a great tool to have at hand for checking the state of photographs before and after edits. There is little useful work that can be done with a part of a picture that has blowout; information has been lost from it, so you cannot derive for it valid information for edits, like the neutral color to be used for work with color temperature. Underexposure bad enough to leave large areas where the brightness levels for one or more channels have hit bottom and can go no lower is the opposite of blowout, but has the same impact.
In Zoner Photo Studio, you can have blowout and underexposure highlighted in a color representing the channel(s) affected, on top of a grayscale version of the picture edited.