StudioLine Photo 2: The Digital Imaging Bargain of the Year? Struggling with Gigabytes of Unorganized Digital Images? Scott Koegler
I continually struggle with managing several gigabytes of digital images that I've collected over several years. I've copied them from one computer to another and organized them in different folders. Some are stored by date, some by subject matter, and some by the camera they were shot with. In other words, it's a mess. The result of this lack of organization is that whenever I need to find a photo, I spend much longer browsing through thumbnails and expend too much brain and eye power searching for the right image.
Thankfully, I've found help in the form of H&M Software's trio of StudioLine products, which go a long way toward organizing my digital shoebox for me. What's even better is how StudioLine's integration of so many individual image management tools makes working with both old and new photos quick and easy.
StudioLine Photo 2, H&M's mid-line product, is now available at a price of $44, a price point that makes it the imaging bargain of the year. You can also download the software as a free 30-day trial evaluation, and a basic edition of StudioLine Basic that carries a reduced feature set is available at no charge.
StudioLine Photo 2 handles nearly every imaginable photo task and all of the most frequently used digital imaging operations, and does them simply and quickly. That's not to say that it will completely replace Photoshop, but the vast majority of tasks that you perform with your digital photos can be done within the StudioLine workspace.
Workflow
StudioLine is an image catalog manager. You can populate the catalog by simply dragging your existing folders of images to the workspace. I dropped a set of folders containing 3,000 images and StudioLine copied them, indexed them, extracted and stored each image's metadata, and created thumbnails in less than 3 minutes. That's extremely fast considering all of the tasks involved.
Once your images are stored in StudioLine, all edits are performed using the internal StudioLine image rather than the original on your drive. This keeps your original images safe from editing mistakes, but StudioLine goes one better than that — you can make as many changes and edits to your image within StudioLine and the original image is never modified. Cropping, color modification, resizing, and any other edits are done as layers, but without the complexity.
I copied a set of images from my SmartMedia card to StudioLine's workspace by dragging them from Windows explorer to StudioLine's workspace. Once the thumbnails were visible, I was able to rearrange them so that the pictures I wanted to work on were at the top of the page. I did this by simply dragging them to the position I wanted them to appear. Since they were all taken at the same time, they all needed the same color correction.
I selected the images by dragging the cursor to include the pictures, then clicked the Image Toolbox and selected Auto-Tone and Auto-Level. These controls work instantly and do a great job at livening up most images. For more detailed editing, you can make adjustments to individual color separation levels, or use the live histogram with 18 different views of your color renditions.
I would have preferred to see the ability to apply frames and edges to the images, but StudioLine lets you export your image directly to the photo editor of your choice if you need to go beyond its built-in functions.
