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Good morning everyone!
Anyone interested in manipulating photos and images will enjoy today’s review of this software. It’s
‘main claim to fame’ is its drag and drop feature – whereby you only need to drag an image into the
‘drop box’ to begin whatever it is you’d like to do with it.
This software will not only be of interest to web designers, but to anyone who would like to quickly edit their images. Since I’m always providing screenshots with my reviews, I was especially interested to see how well the program would work for me.
Developer: Nusoft
Supported Languages: English. If there are others, it’s not stated anywhere on the website.
System Requirements: Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP
Additional Requirements: None
Tested: On Windows XP Pro.
Interface:
I was surprised to see that the drop box itself was so small. It presents itself as a window 140 x 410, and resides in your tray with a photo icon. However, you are able to permanently change the dimensions of the window if preferred, by using the [File] drop down menu if it’s too small for you.
While many of the icons explain themselves by their appearance, there are no tool tips included. I found this a big minus – mostly for people new to image processing. I don’t think it’s efficient to have to refer to the help files all the time, just to know what each icon does.
Your choices are [Custom] or [Resize] if you’d prefer to change the size of the drop box.
Resize: There are several changes you can make after clicking here: You can choose to keep the [original folder,] or change to a [specific folder] instead. It’s an unfortunate fact, that with this program, you can only change the [output format] to limited formats: jpg; gif; bmp; tif; png and pcx. While this may place limitations on other users, for me it could be perfect, as I try to save all my images as pngs anyway.
If you’re new to image formats, png stands for portable network graphic and is the only other transparent image format, aside from gif. This format serves most of my needs, which I was happy to see. Interestingly, many of the image programs that I’ve tested, will not let you save to png, which really surprises me, as these days, it’s becoming a much more popular image format.
Why do I prefer this format? Unlike jpg you’re able to compress an image, without losing any quality. However, as you can see with the images here, sometimes I had problems creating a transparent background. I wasn’t happy with this at all.
Configuration:
Staying with the resizing options; you’re able to determine the quality of the output, by determing the compression value. Then you’re given the choice of [progressive] or [Huffman Optimization.] Many casual or new users would have no idea what this means; the layman’s explanation, is that [progressive] means the image will slowly appear on the web, displaying it line by line, until it’s filled in the entire image.
[Huffman Optimization.] While I know of ‘Huffman Coding,’ it’s definitely not the same thing. As I’ve heard of of Huffman optimization, I turned to my friend, Google and didn’t even see one entry in 6 pages of the search that referenced this term and I carefully checked each entry.
Perhaps the developer can shed some light on this for us.
Regardless, I did manage to glean that both are obviously compression methods, also enabling [Smoothing] of images. You’re also able to determine how much compression to use. Here’s a brief explanation, if you’ve never dealt with this before:
- Less compression = more quality but slower downloading on a web page;
- More compression = less quality but faster downloading on a web page.
With gifs, you have two options:
Interlacing: This means that the image will appear slowly, either by displaying only every few lines (or every other line, depending on the program,) to begin with, to give you a rough idea of the image. It might also show only a few pixels at a time, for the same reason.
Colors: You’re also able to determine how many colors you want displayed in the image. Formatting as a gif has a limitation of 256 colors, which flattens out your image somewhat and doesn’t appear as nicely as if you’d used 16 million colors in another format. Be aware that this is an inappropriate format for photographs – as it presents quite odd results.
This software also has two choices for bmp images: however there is no really no reason in this day and age to use this format. It’s antiquated and I won’t use an image program that only accepts these. At any rate, within Drop Box Image Processor, you’re given the same two choices for outputs, as for gifs.
A more common format is jpg. Again, you’re given the same two options for colors and compression, however you’re also able to choose a [Filter] and a [Background Color.]
Filter: Choices are none; sub; and Paeth.
The point of these filters, is to actually prepare the data in your image so that you can optimize your compression. The algorithms within filters applies to bytes only, never pixels.
Note: The png format, is the only image format that doesn’t have any restrictions on filter types.
Sub Filter: This takes a pixel, compares it to the previous pixel and produces the difference. A very thorough explanation of which image format might be the best for you; is here.
Paeth Filter: This is the best compression method for both grayscale and true color images – and is mostly used for jpg and png format filtering.
If you don’t know what you’re doing, I suggest first making a copy of your original image, then applying one filter. Make another copy of the original image again, this time applying the other filter, and see which one looks the best for you. Just make sure you always keep the original image unedited, until you decide which filter you’re finally going to apply.
Note: Many image programs don’t allow you to choose a compression filter.
Ok. So having applied your filter (or chosen not to,) png also allows you to select a background color. I usually choose a background color very different to the outside pixels of the image. This way I can determine (later) which color to nominate as my transparency.
The last image format choice, is PCX. This is such an ancient format, that I was surprised to see it in the program. It was originally a DOS image standard and has been well replaced by imaging formats. As far as I’m concerned, the developer could lose this image format altogether.
I don’t recommend that you ever choose this method.
Once you’ve completed the configuration of the [Output Format] you can continue with your resizing options. (I bet you forgot that this was what we originally doing! 
Next, choose a new file name and check the default options of whether or not to keep the original date or not. If you just want it to overwrite the original image, UNcheck the box [Ask before overwrite.]
I know that for people new to image manipulation, this probably all sounds a little complicated, but if you just follow the prompts, and refer to this review at the same time, you’ll have no problems at all.
From the [File] menu, you can also choose whether or not to boot the program with your Windows start-up process. I don’t see any need for this sitting in the tray with other active programs and would only launch it when I planned on working with images.
Proceeding to the [View] menu, we see that the software is also skinnable (this is a Swan-word. This is handy if you really care about the
aesthetics of your GUIs (graphic user interfaces.) The default looks just like any other Windows message box, however the program had the [Athen] option applied. After trying them all, I preferred the [Office 2003] skin.
You also have the option to change the opacity of the drop box. More and more programs are including this choice these days. It enables the drop box to appear semi (or total if you wish,) transparent. I generally set mine to around 75% opacity, which enables me to just see what’s beneath it. Some people love this option, others do not, so go with your own preference.
Staying with the [View] menu, the last two options are [Auto Resize] and [Auto Hide,] both were checked as defaults, however, I UNchecked auto resize, as I prefer to determine my own resizing parameters.
Help File: I found their help file to be excellent and explanatory, enabling even the newest of users to learn not only how to use the program, but about image processing itself. It included examples of outputs also.
Features:
- Drag and drop;
- Rotate and flip;
- Brightness and contrast;
- Adjust color;
- Add text to image;
- Watermark (but only text, NO image watermarking!)
- Resize image and/or canvas;
- Crop;
- Shadow;
- Filters;
- Effects.
I’m not going to explain each one of these, or you’ll be asleep by the end of the review, however, if there’s something you really don’t understand, please feel free to contact me, using the [Send me an IM!] button at the top of this review.
Standard with most image programs, you can save your choices as a preset. This means that each item you’ve chosen/changed, can be stored within the program and called again to apply to another image. If you’ve defined your choices as a preset, [Load Preset,] will apply all of them in one go. I always find this a handy time saving option.
Summary:
I found that CPU usage, even while the program resided and ran in the tray, was very low. With the many programs that I have running all the time, that would be a big plus for me.
I didn’t like the fact that when I tested the program with an image I grabbed from the web, Drop Box Processor instantly overwrote the original image. This was unexpected and I consider it a flaw. I want my original image in tact always. In fact, I tend to keep all my original images, regardless of what other image I’ve produced from the source.
I also noticed that there was NO undo feature, so be very careful about what you plan to do with the program and what result you want. This software definitely needs a preview feature, and because of these two reasons, I won’t be using Drop Box Image Processor.
Here is where I’ll caution people new to image processing, to beware. In fact, because of this, one might even steer people looking for image programs, away from this one.
Noise also occurred in my test images and with no way to remove it, you’d have to launch another image program, such as Corel Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Fireworks CS3 (both excellent programs!) to remove it. When you can’t remove problems that the software creates itself, this is another flaw.
I also found that two of my resulting images displayed moiré patterns – definitely undesirable .
Moiré patterns usually will often show two grids which are overlaid at differing angles. Here is an example:
Price: US$19.95 – not worth the price.
Points:
- Originality: 2/10
- Functionality: 4/10
- Intuitiveness: 6/10
As you can see by my points system, I don’t think too much of this program at all. I do not recommend it, especially when there are so many other great programs available – including freeware.
Skip this offer on the Giveaway of the Day web site today, unless you feel compelled to test it out for yourself. The price doesn’t gel with performance of this software and as for myself; I wouldn’t pay more than $10 for the way it is at the moment. However, the program could have merit, especially if it included screen shots and fixed all the problems that its current experiencing.
I‘d suggest waiting till the next version, to see what’s been fixed.
Enjoy your day everyone!
~ Swan
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“The day will come when machines and software will tell us whom to know; what to eat; what to wear; when to go to work and what profession to pursue; when to sleep; what entertainments to enjoy and with whom to have any kind of relationship. It can’t be avoided and you will succumb.”
~ Swan 2005 |
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Posted by ~ Swan 
