PaintBuster Review

It has been a while since I reviewed an image editing software. Whenever you look at a commercial print, every person in there or every object is perfectly defined and the edges are sharp or blurred. You cannot help thinking whether that print was edited in a special software designed to bring quality to the image.

I cannot refrain myself from paying attention to the details in different images (especially those that advertise cosmetic articles). Few are the pictures that are natural and all the effects are due to the light of the studio.

Nowadays, you can take any picture and metamorphose it into a chef d'oeuvre. All you need is the vision, because the tools can be found everywhere on the Internet. Such an image tool is going to be presented in the following lines. Its name is PaintBuster and the developer is Softbusters. The price for the software is $39. However, the producer makes available a trial version that is open to evaluation for a period of 30 days.

The interface of the application is beautifully drawn up and the gradient used is not hurting your eyes at all. All the options and tools of the software are arranged both vertically and horizontally. The tools are useful in creating nice images and retouching the ones that are not to your taste.

The most part of the application window is occupied by the workspace or the image display. The range of options is pretty wide and they comprise features like removing red eyes or Clone Pen and Smudge Brush.

Zooming in and out the picture is easy and the keyboard shortcut for these actions is NumLock+/-. If you have nice pictures of you and someone dear to you, then you can add a frame to it so that it transforms in a real portrait.

The available mask types in the softwares are freehand, rectangular and elliptical. You can also fill color with mask or make rubber band mask. Almost the same options are available with Clip option, which allows the user to make freehand clip, make a point to point clip.

The Browse View option allows you to view the entire contents of your image folders. Double clicking on one item will load it into the software and from then on, the only limit in transforming it is your imagination. Only on click on the item will display the detail info about it (name, size, file size, date when it was created, format and compression).

I will skip directly to the most important features of the software as all the others you get to see in any other similar softwares. The Image menu is the place to go if you are looking for effects, image tuning and filtering.

Tuning your image is actually improving its aspect by tampering with the contrast, brightness, or saturation. Of course, these are not the only options in here and you can also highlight certain areas of the pictures or shadow them. Light, glow or sunlight are different options designed to open up the picture a little bit.

You will notice a green target in your picture. That little sign defines the affected area of the picture. You can grab it and place it wherever you want inside the image. By using the slider, you will apply your tuning gradually to only a circular area of the image. The Inverted box will have as effect inverting the affected area. All the sliders will have at the right end the percentage box that lets you know the ?tuning amount? you apply.

Image Filters include sharpening, softening or blurring the image. The last of these three options benefits
from five different choices (average, motion, radial motion, zoom and gaussian). The gamma can also be corrected, and anti-aliasing can be applied. The Strength slider controls all of the filters. The affected area option is also available in here and so is the invert affected area.

Image Effects features are structures on Art Media, Artistic and Geometric, each of them having their own set of options. Their transparency and strength can be corrected by dragging the sliders to the right or to the left. Art Media effect comprises the following options: colored pencil, charcoal, colored chalk, brush strokes and oilified. All of them are spectacular and unique in their own way.

The artistic section is richer than the previous effect. It contains a set of options designed to stylize the image. Thus, you can use Impressionist, Aged Newspaper, Lens Flare, Rock, Neon, Metallic, Gold, Ice, Rain Drops and Balls.

The Geometric effects comprise presets like wind, pixelate, mosaic, Roman mosaic, pointillism, fish eye, cylindrical, sphere, swirl, wave and ripple. I must tell you that you can set the strength or transparency of the effect.

Fading options are another strong point for the software as there are six types: fade to blur or sepia are just two of them.

I will stop here with the review, as I want you to discover for yourselves the full power of PaintBuster. To be frank, there isn't much more to be said about the software and the rating will give away my opinion on the application.

The Good

I liked the options that are incorporated in here, especially the effects. The interface is very nicely created and you will not spend valuable time to search for certain features, although I warn you not to limit yourselves to the buttons in the toolsbar and check out the menus, too. They still have options that are not in plain view.

The Bad

The effects are OK, but I must warn you that they are a little mixed up and - if you click on one of them - you will obtain the next effect in line. Not all the subsets are shuffled but in Art Media and Artistic you should take a look at the result before clicking OK.

I did not like how the layers acted. They gave me a minor headache as they do not function as in other layer image editing tools I have seen by now. But once you catch the going ons, you will be just fine.

The brush size changing seemed to me a little ensconced and I had a little trouble finding it and I was not too keen on having a process that eats up 100MB of my computer memory. I have 512MB of RAM installed, the recommended requirements specified 256MB and it still did not work smooth enough.

The Truth

I was expecting quality from a software that has reached its 11.7 version and, except the above mentioned baddies and the fact that it works a little slow, the application is OK. The quality delivered is worth the price