Review: Ashampoo Photo Commander 11's may features add up to a disappointing image editing experience

A feature list is a tempting, treacherous marketing tool. Just because a product can do something, doesn't mean it can do it well. Case in point, Ashampoo Photo Commander: This "do-it-all" photo tool has an enviable list of features that includes anything from 3D image support to a MiniMap to eliminate scrollbars, and yet ends up feeling underpowered, clunky, and disappointing.

By default, Ashampoo's interface is crowded, and features ads for the company's other products.

Ashampoo' Photo Commander's glut of features carries through to its default window arrangement: a menu bar, two toolbars, a file browser with its own partially-visible toolbar (that opens on Ashampoo's Pictures library, not your own Pictures folder), image metadata, and a wide timeline with many filtering options. The middle of the window has an area to display the selected image, too, crowded in by all of the other interface elements.

For an application that offers so many features, Ashampoo neglects some of the very basics. For example, it doesn't automatically rotate vertical photos: If you happened to take a photo with your camera turned sideways, Ashampoo will display the photo sideways, even if it contains rotation information. Even Windows Explorer, which doesn't purport to be an image editing application, heeds this rotation metadata and shows images correctly turned.

Ashampoo fails to automatically rotate images according to camera orientation.

Another issue is that Ashampoo Photo Commander feels slow. On a Windows 8 system with an Intel i7-3770K CPU and 32GB of RAM, I had to wait for several seconds until Ashampoo finally displayed all of the thumbnails for a single folder. When I navigated into that same folder using Windows Explorer, the thumbnails appeared instantly, with no perceptible lag at all.

With a bit of work, Ashampoo's interface can be cleaned up, but it still feels slow.

Before Ashampoo tries to tackle complex image editing tasks, it should take care of the basics. With free competitors such as Google's Picasa offering a fast and polished image editing experience, Ashampoo is facing some serious competition. The key to winning may be in the details and fit-and-finish, rather than in adding one more bullet to the feature list.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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Review: WeVideo is a cloud-based video editor that makes editing in your browser fun and simple

The cloud is all the rage these days. We've got email in the cloud, backup in the cloud, not to mention project management, image editing, and pretty much everything else that you use your PC for in the cloud. WeVideo wants to add one more type to the mix: A cloud-based video editor.

What makes it potentially hard to get off the ground with a cloud-based video editor is that all of your raw footage must find its way into the editor. A decent five-minute video could require hours of raw footage to create. Since most users have connections with slower upload than download speeds, you could be uploading footage for hours on end before you can even begin editing. Fortunately, WeVideo's seamless connection with Dropbox and others cloud-based file storage services makes this less of an issue.

Erez ZukermanWeVideo makes it easy to export to connected cloud services, but its free option is watermarked.

When I use my Galaxy S III to shoot footage, it is automatically uploaded to Dropbox. The upload takes time, but I don't need to think about it or do anything to make it happen. Once the files are in Dropbox, I only need to point WeVideo at them, and it pulls them into the editor very quickly. Feeding WeVideo with a gigabyte of footage took less than ten minutes, once it was all on Dropbox.

Once your footage is in the editor, the editing experience is simple and pleasant. WeVideo offers a timeline you can drag clips onto. It is easy to trim clips as needed and add transitions, and there's a rich library of soundtracks you can use. Fading audio in and out takes just a couple of clicks, and the whole system felt responsive and would be familiar to anyone with experience with desktop video applications.

One advantage of WeVideo's cloud-based nature is collaboration: You can invite friends to upload footage to your project, and even create different edits based on the same footage. This collaborative workflow is one of the service's main selling points.

Once you're done editing, it's time to export your work. Free accounts can only export very low resolution (480p) watermarked video. I understand the limitation, but I wish WeVideo was more upfront about it and made it clear as part of the registration process, rather than reveal it at the last possible moment when the editing work has been done. It is easy to connect WeVideo to YouTube and other Web video services, so you don't have to download a file and upload it to YouTube yourself–WeVideo does the whole thing on its own.
If you need to collaborate on a video project with a distributed team, WeVideo offers important benefits and can let you share footage and edits in ways that aren't possible otherwise. It can also come in handy for the occasional solo project, as long as you don't mind uploading your footage to the cloud prior to editing.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can use the latest version of this Web-based software.

Endlessly tweaking his workflow for comfort and efficiency, Erez is a freelance writer on a mission to discover the simplest, coolest, and most effective software and websites to make tomorrow happen today.
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Review: Ashampoo Photo Converter 2 handles most basic image editing functions

Expatriate Scotsman now living in Wurzburg, Germany, freelance writer, frustrated future bestselling author, obsessed bibliophile. Other interests include trying to understand The Architect in the Matrix movies, decrypting codes and ciphers, and trying to persuade my landlord and my wife to let me have a Highland Cow for a pet.
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If you work with images, you probably have a lot of editing tools on your computer which cover a wide range of functions. Going back and forth between these programs and loading and re-loading the same image takes up time and energy. So what if you could do away with all of those programs, and instead have all editing functions under one roof? That is what Ashampoo Photo Converter 2 ($15, 40-day free trial) tries to accomplish.

One thing to say up-front is that this is not Photoshop-grade software. Far from it. If you want to remove an unsightly spot on the end of someone's nose, then this is the wrong software for you. Instead Photo Converter 2 tries to cover all the basic nitty-gritty editing functions such as resizing, adding a watermark, rotating, flipping, changing the colors (brightness, contrast, etc) and converting to another image format.

You can perform these functions on either a single file or a batch of files, and specify whether you want the original unedited files deleted or kept. Ashampoo uses the tired cliché of "a Swiss Army Knife" to describe Photo Converter 2 and it does a pretty good job of matching up to that image. I just wish the phrase "Swiss Army Knife" would be permanently retired when it came to developers trying to describe their work.

When installing, the software will attempt to install a browser toolbar and change your homepage and default search engine. To avoid this, choose the custom installation option.  When installed, you also need to click configuration>Service Channel and uncheck "recommendations from the Ashampoo team". Otherwise, every time you close the software, you are going to get a nag screen trying to sell you something else.

Add your desired image or folder of images to begin the editing process.

One of the good things about aShampoo has to be the batch editing. For example, you can choose a folder full of images and once chosen, Ashampoo will load all of the images contained in that folder. From there, you can make one choice which will be instantly applied to all the images. This is especially great if you have holiday photos which need resized to the same height and width.

After spending some time trying out all of the different functions and putting it through its paces, I have found no problems with any of the functions. They all work fine and produce outstanding results.  The only thing I would complain about is that the preview window showing the image is very small, so when you are carefully tweaking animage, it is hard to see exactly if things are looking the way you want them to. Making the window a bit bigger would make this software a lot better.

Despite this little objection, if you are looking for a single piece of software which covers all of the basic editing functions and is fairly priced, and which offers the ability to batch process images, then give Ashampoo Photo Converter a try.

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Snappy Z-Maestro Offers Affordable--but Limited--Audio Editing

Z-Maestro, from the people who brought you the Finestra virtual desktop utility, is a simple, easy-to-use, and promising digital audio workstation that offers multi-track audio and MIDI sequencing. It has some very nice features as well as some unique ones, but suffers too many rough edges. At this point the program remains very much a work in progress.

Z-Maestro's interface is clean and simple, and uses the right mouse button for entry rather than context menus.Just a couple of the rough spots I ran across were the lack of an indication when multiple notes were selected in the piano roll MIDI editor, and an error message when I tried to drag an audio file onto an audio track. I also found some of the icons unintuitive, and the Play button doesn't change to a Stop button when a file is playing (though it still functions as such).

Z-Maestro doesn't support VST FX or VSTi virtual instruments, but it does offer a few of its own FX and supports SoundFonts, which are a reasonable substitute for VSTis. Editing issimple, and the program feels very snappy compared to most DAWs. I hope the author will be able to maintain that sprightly feel as the program matures and gains more features.

Currently I can't recommend Z-Maestro as anything other than a quick and dirty recording app in its Lite incarnation. It has potential, but the demo version offers only three tracks and the pro version is far too immature to pay $30 for--especially when you can get powerful DAWs such as Cakewalk Music Creator or Magix Music Maker for only $20 more.

Note: The link takes you to the vendor's page, where you can download the software.

--Jon L. Jacobi

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