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Quick Look: Picturesque - Create Web 2.0 Style Images

Submitted by sheala on Wed, 07/11/2007 - 12:49.

I think I’m beginning to see all my life in web 2.0. I feel like everything should be shining, glowing, reflecting and interactive. There’s all sorts of little programs that can help make life more 2.0; Picturesque is one of them.

The concept is pretty simple. Open Acqualia’s Picturesque. Drag and drop a graphic file (JPG, GIF, PNG) onto the main screen. Wait. Adjust the results to your liking. It’s all live and pretty immediate. It will change your background color, add a reflection, add shadow and glow, add curves and edges and resize your image.

There is a panel set, with sliders, boxes and buttons to adjust different aspects (angle, opacity, size, etc.) of the effects added. For color changes, Picturesque taps into OS X’s color panel. You can also ‘clear all effects’ to start over.

You can ‘beautify’ folders full of images, by dragging and dropping folders. When you have added more then one image, arrows appear at the bottom of the viewing window, so you can scroll through them. You can then adjust them as a batch as well. Pictures can only be adjusted individually when they are open alone. Brilliantly, there is a save all feature for your batched pictures. Picturesque can also use Apple Scripts and Automator actions.

Picturesque won the 2007 Apple Design Student Project Award for good reason. It’s current version is the 1.0.3, just released. As a 1.0 version, it’s very well thought out. I only found two little niggling things that bothered me. First, I couldn’t use the undo command. I checked the help files and didn’t find anything about it. Sometimes for small changes, I like to toggle between undo and redo to compare. Or I like to have alternate views open. Second, EXIF info can’t be stripped for saving files. EXIF info can take up precious KBs in web space.

Conclusion:

Still, I rate this product pretty high, because it does what it does really well and it’s a 1.0 version. I look forward to seeing it’s evolution and seeing what else Acqualia comes up with. Picturesque requires OS X 10.4 to run.