Light Crafts newest photo-editing program reviewed

June 22, 11:59 AMDenver Photography Careers ExaminerGregory Daily

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    On April 21, 2009, Light Crafts Inc. released Aurora, a new photo-editing program targeted at entry-level photographers and hobbyists who don’t need the advanced editing options built into such programs as Adobe’s Photoshop. At $19.95, I found Aurora to be an easy option for someone looking for a simple, straight-forward way to quickly edit photos of the family picnic or a day at the ball game. Aurora was built with four key features in mind.

    The first was very simple photo editing. Aurora users have the option to perform exposure corrections with the relight tool, adjust crispness, adjust saturation and color balance with the color strength and color warmth tools, respectively, and perform some other minor adjustments like converting the image to black and white, remove redeye and make crops.
    
    When the user wants to perform an adjustment, such as adjusting exposure with the relight tool, Aurora shows the user what the image will look like by displaying the image with 2 steps of adjustment in either direction. This way the user can pick which adjustment looks best and go from there. Aurora then saves the edited images as a non-destructive legacy file, which, when opened again in Aurora, will show what settings were used in editing the image.

    The second key feature to Aurora is its intuitive ability to organize photos. When Aurora opens, it looks for the pictures folder on the PC on which it is running and opens a display window from which users can select images to edit, organize, re-name or publish images. In this viewing pane, the user can add tags and captions to the images, which comes in handy for publishing to social sights like Flickr. (Which, personally, is my favorite feature, but we will discuss that in greater detail later.)

    One drawback I found to Aurora’s organization window is that it doesn’t display the images file name, which is a bit of a hassle. Each image does have a drop down menu where the user can find the image info-pane, listing everything from the image name to the date the image was captured to exposure settings to what lens was used, but if I am viewing say 200 images and I am looking for one specific image by name, then I have to guess what image I want and open the image info.

For Wednesday: Aurora review part 2 - my favorite feature of Aurora and some drawbacks.