PHOTO EDITORS MADE EASY

PHOTO EDITORS MADE EASY Scanners aren't nearly as kind to photographs as the human eye is. We look at photos and see beauty, color, skilled composition; computers just see scratches and dots. Blemishes grow larger. Colors change. car photography at night tips ZSoft's ZPhtoFinish the photo editor software helps make scanned images more pleasing to the eye.

PhotoFinish is a Windows-based image-enhancement program that's essentially a stripped-down version of the company's higher-priced Publisher's Paintbrush.

By the way, if you think you've heard of ZSoft, you probably have. In the years before Windows, it was ZSoft that established the PCX format for bitmapped pictures and provided the well-known PC Paintbrush program for drawing and editing.

As the field of desktop publishing progressed, scanners became a necessity. Trouble is, most scanned images need lots of retouching to make them look the way they should.

That's what PhotoFinish is for. You can buy a more expensive package, but you may never need more than PhotoFinish has to offer.

PhotoFinish's many features may be overwhelming at first, and ease of use isn't one of the program's strong points. Part of the problem is a tutorial that tends toward tangential explanations when a more straightforward approach would have lent more continuity to the lessons.

Tools and Knobs Choose your drawing or styling tool from a workbox consisting of a floating grid of 37 icons. You can resize or condense the grid according to your particular needs.

In addition to the tools workbox and the width and shape workbox, there is a third workbox consisting of a palette of colors or grays.

All three workboxes can be moved or hidden, which is handy.

Although the presence of those workboxes is a comfort for the

beginner, for heavy-duty retouching jobs, you'll be delighted to get rid of some (or all) of them.

Seven retouching tools (Contrast, Brighten, Tint, Blend, Smear, Smudge, and Sharpen) give detailed control over an image by letting you adjust only selected areas of the image.

You use the Width and Shape Workbox to choose the shape and style of each tool, as well as how many pixels the tool affects.

It's like choosing an appropriate tip for a pastry bag when frosting a birthday cake.

Anyone who's ever had to fiddle with the knobs on the side of a video monitor knows the effect of brightness and contrast changes.

But instead of messing with the whole image, the freehand brightness or contrast tools gussy up only a selected area of a picture.

The Smear, Blend, and Smudge tools are also quite useful.

Smear produces a finger-painting effect;

Blend, used correctly, softens contrast between adjacent colors and textures; and Smudge jubles the pixels.

The Sharpen tool has the opposite effect of Blend, while Tint (represented by a pair of sunglasses) leaves behind a light layer of color or gray.

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