"Hi, I am Michał. I’m the author of a new photo editing program. Krzysztof was kind enought to let me write to you here about it. I’m grateful for that. The program is called IMAGIA. It works similar to Lightroom or Aperture. It covers most of the tasks photographer does in the post production process. I’ve been writing this program for the last three years and decided It will finally be released.
What IMAGIA does? First of all it developes RAW files of most cameras there are on the market. Then it allows to tune the tones and colors of the photo by changing white balance, brightness, contrast, saturation and so forth. It has some standard effects like sharpenning and microcontrast tuning, removing or adding vignette.
I didn’t want IMAGIA to be as stiff as most photo editing programs. Being inspired by lomography movement, I added some fun stuff to it. You can add film grain, light leaks, color flashes effects, dirt and scratches overlays. There is a cross processing slider. But please don’t think IMAGIA is just another Instagram clone. You have lots of control over your image. Things like contrast or brightness algorythms were rewriten three or four times until I was sattified.
After doing global adjustments I usualy do some local changes. IMAGIA has a set of brushes. They are named by what they do. So you pick a “lighten brush” to lighten selected parts of the image or a “sharpen brush” to sharpen some other parts. You can decide if you want to paint only on lights or only on shadows. You can avoid skin colors while using brushes. There is also the edge sensitive mode. Only colors that are similar to the color under the center of the brush are affected when this mode is on.
Finally you export your work. Since IMAGIA is non-destructive editor, the changes made to the image are saved automatically, apart from the original file, which is never changed directly. Exporting means creating new output file, usualy in a jpg or tiff format. IMAGIA can export images directly to the Facebook, Google+, Skydrive or to the Flickr.
What distinguishes IMAGIA from the competition?
The first thing I’ve already mentioned. It’s the lomo style effects, which you can compose into your photo. And remember that if you don’t like this kind of effects, they will not get into your way.
The second unique feature is the mechanism of creating and sharing templates. Templates are sets of the settings. Each template brings different style to a photo. Users can create their own templates and can share them with other people via IMAGIA’s web page.
The third advantage of IMAGIA is its user interface. I worked hard so it was as intuitive as possible. Program allways runs in fullscreen mode and the settings are allways in the same positions. Thanks to the fullscreen mode, the working area is allways as big as your screen, which is a great thing because you see more details of the photo. Settings are allways at your fingertips, on the main window. You don’t have to dig through dozen of seperate windows to set a few changes. It is smart to learn at least a few keyboard shortcuts because they are a huge help. F1 lists them. I’ll give you an example. Hold “T” and move your mouse to change both the temperature and the tint. You can assign your own settings to the shortcuts to have brightenning under Alt + 1, sharpening under Alt + 2 or cross processing under Alt + 3.
The fourth adventage of IMAGIA is its compatibility with Windows XP. About 20% of all PCs runs XP. I couldn’t ignore that.
And finally the speed. This was a real challenge. How to make sharpen slider work smoothly when applying the effect on the 36 megapixel image takes fifteen seconds... This is very subjective, but I think IMAGIA’s speed is over the average.
IMAGIA’s web page is at http://imagia.oprolab.pl. You can try IMAGIA Lite which is free and has all the functions of the full version except exporting files which has some limits. The output image is no higher then 1200px, has a small IMAGIA watermark and can’t be saved directly to the disk. But still it can be sent to Facebook, Google+ or SkyDrive. Direct link to the download - http://imagia.oprolab.pl/
If you would like to watch some tutorials and presentations look at my YouTube channel - http://www.youtube.com/user/
If you are a Steam user you can vote for me at http://steamcommunity.com/
We’ve agreed with Krzysztof, that we would like to propose a contest for you. The first person who will share a template will get a serial to the full version of IMAGIA. After two weeks we will choose two best templates and their authors will also get a serial to the full version of IMAGIA. Of course templates can be shared also from the Lite version. Tips about sharing templates in IMAGIA can be found on my YouTube channel.
Good luck to you all and one more time thanks to Krzysztof.
Michał "
Well, good luck dear readers - it's a chance to get a new piece of software for free if you win!
The winner will get a license from author of IMAGIA software (Michał) not from me (i'm not a organizer of this competition).
Kind regards
Krzysztof Czerwiński
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