Product ReviewsMultimedia software
PictoColor is a developer with a very specific stable of tools; its speciality is colour correction and processing, and iCorrect EditLab ProApp 6.0 is a standalone product that helps to produce professional-quality colour-corrected photos, reliably, easily and consistently. As well as helping process images individually, this tool is designed to help batch-process images and even perform corrections essentially automatically. Images are stashed in the ProcessQ horizontal panel at the bottom of the window, the selected one shown in the main box, and the controls are listed on the right. It can take a little while to get used to EditLab's approach to workflow. The lack of a zoom for the main image display is disconcerting, but then this isn't designed for brush-style editing work. Landscape-orientated images are easier to work with, simply because they fit better in the interface than portrait-orientated shots. The zoom isn't a crucial issue, however, because features such as sharpening and noise removal use zoomable preview windows to show their effects before they're applied. More importantly, to maximise the quality of the output the software integrates these operations into the colour correction process. This helps avoid the subtle but real generational loss that step-by-step
The bulk of the correction features are broken up across four tabbed sections; Color Balance, Black and White Point, Brightness/Contrast/Saturation, and Hue Selective Edit. Curiously, these are displayed as old-fashioned line-drawn folder tab graphics, but more of that in a moment. The software doesn't work with CMYK images, but with the growing importance of all-RGB workflows this is less of a concern. It couldn't handle Photoshop CS3's Zip-based Tiff compression, but the more traditional LZW compression was supported. It was also as happy with 16-bits-per-channel RGB images as it was with 8-bits-per-channel ones, but it wouldn't open native Photoshop PSD files nor Camera Raw documents. The lack of Raw support isn't surprising, but it does mean that its usefulness as part of a Raw image workflow is only relevant where files are pre-processed in other software and saved in EditLab-compatible formats first. One thing that didn't impress us was the way it defaulted to applying sRGB as the document's colour space regardless of the image's profile. This is fine for general web use, but for serious colour work and print it is too restrictive. Fortunately, its preferences allow this to be controlled, and there are also options for managing how images with missing or different profiles are handled. It has to be said that the look and feel of this application is reminiscent of old System 7 software, albeit with OS X buttons and pop-up menus. It is clear that the developers know what they're doing when it comes to image processing, but it would be better if the interface felt more modern. Still, the results are very good; spend a little time getting used to its idiosyncracies and tweaking its default settings and you'll have an image processing powerhouse at your command. By Keith Martin
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