Advanced Options Continued

The Finishing Touches area lets you add a variety of borders or sheens to your edited photo. You can add a matte, vignette, gloss, border (36 choices) or a reflection. You can also add your own borders to their library. The best part is, if you don’t like the result, there are many levels of undo.

Saving a Photo

The program offers you a dialog to save your edits when you switch back to the Browser to work on another photo. It’s not immediately obvious when you click Save, but a second dialog appears in which you can rename the edited photo and change the save location. At first, it looks like it will overwrite your original photo; but rest assured, it does not, unless you save the photo to its original location.

You can also save your photo to a variety of sources from the Share Via command in the File menu. Choices include adding the photo to iPhoto, sending it to a variety of online services, including a MobileMe Gallery, or sending it via email. You can even pop the photo into your currently open iChat window, but that’s a bit buggy too. You can send it only to the first chat you opened, not subsequent chats with other people. It also seriously reduced the size of the photo, from a 20 x 15-inch photo to a 3 x 2-inch photo, with no dialogs. The implementation is odd, but mostly works.


Share Menu
The good news is that when you choose Save As Copy from the file menu, the resolution isn’t changed. Again, that command isn’t standard though, it should be Save As like all other Macintosh programs. You can save to most of the common file formats including TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PNG, PDF, and PSD (Adobe Photoshop).

Print & Layouts

A Print & Layouts button, in the Browser and Edit window Toolbar, takes you to a layout window. The bottom of the window includes a variety of print layouts, including a Fun Book, Banner, Thin Strips, and Greeting Card. You can also print side-by-side, one image over the other, three images, a number of views of four images, or five and seven images of different sizes, all on one sheet. Amazingly, Funtastic Photos also has a mosaic option (Collage), which is missing in most photo editing programs. It had some funky results, but considering how much processing power is required to produce a mosaic, it is impressive. The more photos you choose, the better your mosaic result, but when choosing more photos by clicking the Add button, the program seemed to hiccup, so be careful. I recommend you choose all the photos you want included before choosing the collage layout. Ilene thinks that this feature alone is worth the asking price.


Picture Collage Layout

Overall

This program is fun to use, but you should experiment with the tools to see how your edited photos look. You can take your less than stellar digital photos and turn them into some amazing pieces of art. If you don’t like your result, try something else. Remember the magic word: Undo. You don’t work on the original, you work on a copy, so if you mess up, it isn’t a big deal. Once you have your final image, you can use the share feature to send your photo to a number of services, or email them to friends, or simply save it to disk.

While the program works well, it may stall periodically when applying a number of edit choices. Generally, Funtastic Photos applies filters immediately and you see the results in the edit window. In fact, it seems to apply edits much faster than more expensive photo editing programs. While the easy to use interface makes editing a snap, it isn’t very Mac-like in places. For example, an Undo and Rewind to Original command sit in the Toolbar, but each advanced editing option includes its own Reset button. It seems a bit redundant. A number of commands stalled a little or didn’t work immediately, but it never affected the final output. Even though the program isn’t perfect, its ease of use and features warrant a 4-star rating.

Photos © Ilene Hoffman, 2008. Reuse without permission is prohibited.