Snapfire is new software from Corel that helps you in organising your photos and getting more value out of them. It has good image enhancement options and ways to use your photos in fun ways.
Snapfire is a piece of software aimed at the amateur photographer, home user and hobbyist. When you start it up the main options are divided into separate panels to organize, enhance, show and create. It is a Windows only application, but will work with Vista.
It helps you organize by being able to download images from your camera, watch full-screen slideshows of your downloaded images, rate your images, organize them further into photo trays and search not only on filenames but on tags and captions. This works well and provides the key components to make your photography better. The ease of not only downloading but also viewing and rating is essential in helping you to refine your photographic skills. It also works on videos.
For enhancing your images it provides a good set of tools. It is not Photoshop or PaintShop Pro but it is good at what it does. You can do retouching of a pretty sophisticated nature, crop, straighten, correct color, exposure, contrast, convert to black and white, etc. It has effective red eye removal tools and works quickly and effectively.
You can show and share your images by emailing photos or whole photo trays of them, turn them into video slideshows, burn a CD or print various sets of images.
Create allows you to edit video clips you take with your camera, add text and fun symbols, add picture frames and edges, create scrapbook pages, cards, calendars, certificates and fake magazine covers, and more.
Snapfire even includes backup capabilities to keep your images safe.
Snapfire comes in two versions: Snapfire and Snapfire Plus. Plus adds many of the features I am talking about here, so it is really the one to get, even though the basic Snapfire is free. Given that Snapfire Plus is only US$39.99, it is hard to pass up.
This is a piece of software clearly suitable for the beginner or someone who is less serious about their photography. It is obviously not Photoshop or PSP, but then it doesn’t try to be. For many people this will be enough software to do what they want to do. It is fun and easy. In fact some people with higher-end software may prefer it for certain tasks.