AAUG Reviews

by Zachary Zalatel, AAUG Member

One of the luxuries of the age of digital photography is that the film is free. Okay, ignore the not-insignificant cost of the camera itself and your computer; my point remains the same - the film is free. You’re able to press the shutter button until either your batteries run out, you memory cards are full, or its grown so dark outside you’re not really taking a picture of anything. The downside of this freedom (you mean it comes at a cost?) is that you’re left with a lot of pictures afterward to sort through. As this can be a daunting task, Mike Bernardo at Green Volcano Software has developed Photon to your life a little easier.

Photon is application designed with four primary tasks in mind. It imports your images so that you can view and sort them however you wish. Once you’re done sorting them, you can convert them to whatever format you wish. Photon is equally at home working with RAW files straight from a memory card as it is working with JPG files from your hard drive.

Upon opening Photon, you are presented with a clean and uncluttered window, beckoning you to feed it some pictures. You have options to create, remove or export picture stacks (think of sets on Flickr or filmstrips in iPhoto), as well as buttons to show picture metadata, a histogram and any tasks you might have running. When you insert a memory card or drop a folder full of pictures onto the window, the thumbnail pane on the left hand side of the window quickly populates and the first image in the folder appears in the main window. If you click on any point in the picture, Photon zooms in and allows you to inspect in detail (alternately, you can also have it display the images at full size from the get-go). (more…)