Overview

Ashampoo strikes again with the recently updated Photo Optimizer, giving it a fresh new look and adding several useful features that will make manipulating of your images easy as ever. It has everything you need to optimize your photos and make them look amazing: effects, red-eye removal and color correction tools, watermarks, rotation, mirroring and many other features. If you don’t want to manually edit your images, the one-click optimization feature will automatically do the job for you, reliably and accurately. Let’s take a closer look at Photo Optimizer's latest version, 5.

Installation

Installation won’t take much time to finish so you don’t have to worry about that. When you start the process, the first window that will open has a button on the bottom left corner that will redirect you to the program’s system requirements page in Ashampoo’s website if you click it. Otherwise you can continue to the next steps, where you will be asked if you want to install MyAshampoo Toolbar and set MyAshampoo web search as the default homepage and search engine. You can opt-out if you want to, and proceed to the main installation step.

The supported operating systems, as stated in Ashampoo’s website, are Windows XP, Vista and 7.

Interface

The design of this software is so well-organized that you won’t have any trouble finding the function you’re looking for or navigating through your folders and files. On the left panel there is a tree structure to search your hard drive’s folders for the image you want and on the center you can preview it. Below the preview area are thumbnails of all the other pictures located in the selected folder. On the right side of the window you can see the available tools, split in 5 categories: Image, Effects, Remove Red Eyes, Export and Print.

Pros

There’s no doubt that one of the most important features is the One-Click-Optimization tool. All you have to do is just pick the photograph that you want to optimize and then just click the Optimize button. After a few moments you will see a vertical line in the middle of the photo that will let you see the difference before and after using the optimization tool. You can drag it left and right to take a better look at the image. This line appears every time you use a feature and is really helpful to check how effective the action that was taken is.

There are many effects you can use to edit your digital photographs: inversion of colors, change of sharpness/blur, stamp creation, aging of images and others. Each one is placed in the appropriate category and not difficult to use at all.

With Photo Optimizer 5 you also have the ability to convert your photos to different file types. The supported output formats are .bmp, .jpg, .png, .tga and .tiff.

When you have finished working on your photos you have the option to share them with friends and family over the internet. You can send them via email, or upload them to Facebook or Picasa, quick and easy.

Cons

The program crashed a couple of times while testing it, but the main issue that we experienced is that during startup two error messages would popup, both regarding My Bluetooth Places. The first one had the message “The connection could not be established” and the other one said “Your device is busy, please wait and try again”. Those two messages would appear every time the program was launched and the main window would not appear until those two messages were gone.

However, these type of errors are sometimes present with major version upgrades and are usually addressed quickly by Ashampoo's team.

Alternatives

You have probably heard of , but if you haven’t then you should know that it’s one of the most complete image editing software available. It has countless tools and features that can help you edit your photos in any way you wish. There are a few Editions available depending on your needs, but they are quite costly nonetheless. A more suitable alternative would be Lightroom (, ) which comes closer to Ashampoo Photo Optimizer in terms of features. Another good option is , an open source application for Mac, Windows and Linux that is overall almost as good as Photoshop, since they both share most features. Ashampoo Photo Optimizer is not on the same level as the software above, but that’s mainly because it has a slightly different purpose than them, striving and managing to achieve usability and simplicity for users of all skill levels.

Conclusion

If you are seeking for a photo optimizing software that you can count on, then Ashampoo Photo Optimizer 5 is just the perfect solution for you. It is possibly the most modern and user-friendly program that you can use to get the best results from editing your images.