ImageEnhancer is a free image enhancer which allows you to add various effects to an image and comes with a simple interface. It is embedded with lots of filters (64 filters) that can come handy when you quickly want to apply some effects to an image. It can also capture still images from any USB camera that is attached to the computer. It currently supports .jpg, jpeg and .bmp image formats. Some of the basic effects available with Image Enhancer are: Invert, Blur, Oil Paint, Jitter, Simple Edge Detector, Gamma Correction, Contract Correction, Brightness Correction etc. Complex Imaging Filters include: Additive Noise, Mirror Filter, Simple Skeleton, Water Wave, Canvas Crop etc. This tool is a good choice to quickly apply some effects to an image.
Lets discuss some of the effects and features (that are included in the interface) available in ImageEnhancer.
The interface is pretty simple and easy to use. The Image Area is where the images are displayed. The Buttons to open an image, to toggle between the Basic and Complex filter is situated below the Image Area.
Basic Filters are: Binarize, Canny Edge Detection, Rotate RGB Channel, Brightness Correction, Invert, Sobel Edge Detection, Rotate Neighbour, Convolution, Blur, Dither, Salt and Pepper, Floyd Steinberg, Contrast Correction, Simple Skeleton, Saturation Correction, Gaussian Sharpen, Contrast Stretching, Simple Posterization, Sepia, Color Remap, Oil Paint, Sierra Dithering, Sharpen, Difference Edge, Simple Edge Detector, Jitter, Texture, Gaussian Blur, Histogram Equalization, Burkes Dithering, Extract Channel, Homogeneity Edge, Pixellate, Bayer Dithering, Gamma Correction, Adaptive Smoothing.
Complex Filters are: Additive Noise, Y Cb Cr Color Filter, Extract Normalized, Saturation Increment, Bilateral Smoothing, Y Cb Cr Extract, Channel Filtering, Saturation Decrement, Canvas Crop, Transform to Polar, Conservative Smoothing, SIS Threshold, Bayer Filter, Transform from Polar, Susan Corner Detection, Resize Bicubic, Mean, Y Cb Cr Linear, JJN Dithering, Resize Bilinear, Water Wave, Stucki Dithering, Median Filter, Resize N Neighbour, HSL Filter, Simple Skeleton, Mirror Filter, Rotate Bicubic.
Here are some of the effects in action:
Note: You must choose the Image Filter Type (Basic or Complex) before opening the file. If you open the image in Basic Image Filter screen and switch to Complex Image Filter, the changes made to the image is lost and you would need to re-open the image.
You might ask, “I don’t see an option to undo things. Where is the undo button?” Well you don’t need it. You can try the filters without making any changes to the original image file. Once you finalize the filter you want to go with, save the changes and it gives you the dialog box to specify the name for the new file. The default format supported by ImageEnhancer is .jpg, however it can also output the processed images to .bmp format.
Snapshot from you camera
One interesting feature of this tool is that it can capture images from the buffered video from a USB camera attached to the computer. You can choose a camera from the drop down list if you have multiple cameras attached to the computer. This is useful in case you want to apply some effects to your picture that you just clicked with your webcam.
What about shortcuts?
There are no shortcuts in life, but this one does. Though it has got huge buttons, visible from a mile away, but you still have shortcut key combinations assigned in ImageEnhancer. To Open an image, Press Alt+O. To toggle between Modes, press Alt+N (Next) and Alt+B (Back). To refresh, Press Alt+R.
What not is ImageEnhancer?
Image Enhancer is not full-flegged image editing tool. So, you can’t expect ImageEnhancer to resize an image, add layers or draw lines in your image. It is a dedicated tool designed to enhance the images and add effects to it.
Conclusion
ImageEnhancer is a good tool for enhancing an image. The simplified interface rules out the complications of finding your favorite effect from miscellany of options, which normally happens while working with other tools. This can come handy when you quickly want to add some effects to you image. However, if you’re looking for some advanced image editing tools then you can go for something like, Paint.Net or Gimp.
As the tool is in beta stage and more features are to be added, we can expect an upgraded and enhanced version for the software. I would recommend this tool to anyone who would not want to install a software that is complicated with lots of features, but looking for a simple tool to make some touch up to an image.
