Helicon Filter
Versatile, effective, and amazingly low-cost, Helicon Filter is an image editor that supports template-based renaming, voice commenting, color profiles and Exif/IPTC data. It lets you make lossless rotate, copy, delete, and move operations. One of its greatest features is an excellent noise reduction facility with both a dead pixels filter and a dust sensor filter. As you would expect, there are the usual contrast, gamma, and exposure controls, with a gradient haze compensation tool. It also has one-click and manual white balance, B&W conversion, vignette correction, spectral sensitivity controls and first-rate sharpening facilities.
Helicon Filter can crop to all popular paper sizes, with batch cropping and presets for different monitors and mobile phones. Retouching -- which is the set of functions that typifies an image editor and sets it apart from image enhancement products -- is another of its strengths. For this purpose it offers edge-sensitive brushes for blurring, sharpening, changing color, brightness and saturation. It also has a distort brush "to fix protruding ears and similar problems." Processing tends to be a little slow, but is improved by using Helicon Filter Pro with its support for multiple processors.
There are two editions of Helicon Filter: home and pro, with different levels of functionality. It is often bundled with one of the vendor's other products.
Comment
Helicon Filter shows every sign of becoming a mature, capable editor. It is available in English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Dutch and Italian. For anyone starting out in digital photography, perhaps reluctant to spend hundreds of dollars on another editor, it provides a wealth of features, with a bright, cheerful interface that has a sensible arrangement of windows and menus.
Tech info
- OS: Windows 2000 onwards
- Price level: (home edition) $60; (pro) $75
Helicon Soft
Based in Kharkov, Ukraine, Helicon Soft Ltd. has established itself as a developer of specialist software for macro and micro photography. It also offers Helicon Filter, a complete photo editing solution, and the image management program Helicon Photo Safe.
From the same vendor:
- Helicon Focus
- Helicon Photo Safe
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