Homepage: www.zoner.com
As you can see on the screenshot below Zoner Photo Studio is a conventional photo manager. Although it doesn't use a fashionable black user interface and doesn't support non destructive editing, it offers a rich set of features, a wide longtime support of industry standards and a solid performance. Thanks to unicode support it doesn't have problems with national characters. It is distributed in two basic versions - Home and Professional.
Zoner Photo Studio doesn't belong among applications that fully control your workflow. It's up to you what will be your next step. Only when user wants to perform an advanced operation that consits of several steps, Photo Studio leads him with a wizard. Still, you might notice that Photo Studio has a Browser window menu organized according to tasks that are usually performed by a photographer. In detail - these are acquiring images, editing, work with metadata, file manipulation and publishing/sharing.
Before we start with further description it is crucial to introduce you to basic window types in Zoner Photo Studio. First one is Navigator where a directory tree is displayed. Second one is Browse window where you can see thumbnails (or details) of all photographs in current directory. Third window is Editor. When browsing through images, you'll might take advantage of Preview and Information windows. For quick viewing there is also a Viewer/Slideshow which has that advantage over Editor that it preloads images so a step to next image is much faster.
Zoner Photo Studio is a tree based photo manager, that means that it is controlled the same as way as Microsoft Windows explorer. It doesn't store images in a database, it works directly on files as they lay on your disk. This approach has its advantages - like that you always have a perfect control over your photos or that you can leave this product and the metadata will be still there - as it has also some drawbacks like a lack of a time line feature.
Because the Browse window is so similar to the one that you might be used to from Microsoft Windows, you shall have no major problem with its control. It can be adjusted in many different ways, it can display information of your choice and you can use it for
batch processing of images. Detailed description of all its feature is beyond the scope of this article.
Zoner Photo Studio lets you describe images, it gives you access to already existing information and lets you use it in every possible situation. Since version 7 ZPS supports EXIF, IPTC and XMP which are all major metadata standards.
Each standard defines its own set of fields, but Photo Studio hides all the detailed information and cares
about low level access to metadata. Therefore you don't have to fill appropriate fields for every standard,
Zoner Photo Studio will do it for you. But there is more. All data can be accessed through special keywords
allowing a full customization of strings on all possible places throughout the application.
Following screenshot demonstrates thumbnail customization using the keywords:
And here you can see string customization dialog, so you don't have to memorize all keywords:
The result of such customization could be seen on the first screenshot, where each thumbnail displays some of the associated metadata.
To view an image from a Browse window just doubleclick on its thumbnail. A Viewer will start up. To toggle between fullscreen and normal window press Ctrl+F. You can also start an automatic Slideshow by pressing F3. There is one tricky feature in Zoner Photo Studio's Viewer - some settings are shared between the Viewer and Slideshow. You can find them under Slideshow Settings command in Slideshow menu.
There's nothing tricky on the editor if you have used some other bitmap editor before. You can find tools like a clone brush or red eye reduction tool in a toolbar on the left side of the editor. Toolbars on the top contains icons that work as shortcuts to various functions. One of the toolbars controls temporary layer properties if there is such one and another one contains detailed settings for the current selected tool.
To alter an image in the Editor window you can use Filters or tools. Both of these can be combined with selections. Filters generally handle more situations, they can be sequenced and you can save presets for them. On the other hand, Tools allow more precise control and they are used for critical operations like image rotation, red eye removal, cloning etc. I have written a tutorial on contrast adjustment of an image in Editor window and on image resizing if you want to see the Editor in action.
Filters can be called both from the Browse window and from the Editor. When a filter is called from a Browse window, multiple photographs can by modified at once. Using a special batch filter operations can be combined to a single operation as shown below. All settings can be saved as presets and easily preserved for later use.
Zoner Photo Studio has also some features for people that want to push their photographs to another level. You can develop your raw files and create a pseudo HDR image directly from them. You can also stitch Panoramas or create HTML galleries.
There are several variations of Zoner Photo Studio. The most equipped one is Zoner Photo Studio Professional. As many users can't take advantage of special features like 16 bit processing, a cheaper Zoner Photo Studio Home is also offered. It is equipped enough to be a useful tool for an ordinary user, offering him tools for quick adjustment of exposition, correction of red eyes or easy horizont alignment.
Classic or Xpress - limited editions which are shipped with other products and sometimes released for free in magazines.
Home - contains all features that a digital compact camera user needs.
Professional - is targeted on advanced users. It has RAW development support, color management, 16 bit processing and advanced tools for image editing.
Enterprise - this used to be a special version for corporate customers. In ZPS11 this is a very limited version used by pirates only. If you have this variation, please buy the product or get a proper crack.
As it is impossible to list all features here, I'd point you to zoner.com where you should be able to get a more detailed list (with online previews).
If you have read this up to this point, you might be interested in a trial version. An English trial version can be downloaded from www.zoner.com and works for 30 days as a full version. No activation is required. A Czech, Chinese or Japanese localization is also available. More localizations will be available in a few weeks, a German or a Russian one for example.