Soft4Boost Photo Studio 6.6

From common exposure mistakes to skin imperfections, Soft4Boost Photo Studio can help you remove all blemishes from your favorite pictures and turn a good shot into a work of art in minutes. It offers you a good choice of one-click presets and specific tools to improve the lighting, orientation, temperature, or color balance of your digital photographs, among other useful utilities.

You can drag and drop a single image onto the program’s interface or browse for an entire folder or set of pictures. This will allow you to keep all your photos at hand and to select them easily just by clicking on the thumbnail view provided, though the app’s lack of batch-editing capabilities will force you to work on each picture individually.

Soft4Boost Photo Studio’s enhancing and editing features are grouped in four main areas – Red Eye, Retouch, Brush, and Crop. Apart from these, you will find some buttons to rotate your images with one click, a zoom slider, and a button to print the resulting image. Red Eye and Crop are one-function buttons that will help you remove the annoying red-eye effect of many flash-based portraits and to extract and save a selected area as a separate picture, respectively. Note, however, that the latter is not a selection tool to allow you enhance or edit just that section of a picture, but a tool to cut out a part of it. And there is where Brush comes to the rescue. You can customize the size and softness of your brush, and use it to apply a new layer to the existing image. This will let you change the lighting and contrast parameters of a specific area accurately while leaving the rest of the image intact.

Retouch is where the app has gathered most of its enhancing functionality. From one-click presets to editing tools to improve the white and color balance, to add more detail, to correct the tone, or to enhance the contrast and exposure values of the selected picture, here is where all the fun is. You can use the program’s zoom capabilities to work on a smaller section of the picture and to get rid of small blemishes. Most tools are slider-based, which makes the entire editing process easy to use and suitable for all users.

Soft4Boost Photo Studio is not a cheap tool. Actually, for the functionality you get, I find this to be a pricey photo retoucher whose main features are not too hard to find among the plethora of free image editors that you can download from the Web. However, you may find that its simplicity of use and its friendly user interface largely compensate the excess price that you will be asked to pay for a limited set of features and functions.