In response to [@Barry] who wrote “… Franzis’ software products are well designed …”
I disagree.
Franzis is a conglomerate of unrelated subcontractors around the world, releasing an overwhelming plethora of independent products, products that are kept alive perpetually in a variety of versions and “pro” levels all at the same time, products that are randomly bifurcated into arbitrary categories of features, with user interfaces that are adamantly “not invented here” resistant to international standards and as such are impossible to bring knowledge from other imaging programs into Franzis products, and visa versa.
There is a reason I have NEVER used a Franzis product beyond the initial day of the giveaway – because, in being supposedly single-purpose programs, they are arduously inappropriate for most purposes, so I have other needs that they do not meet, so why would I go back to any Franzis product, and which product would I select for any of my own purposes, and whatever benefits they supposedly offer are so difficult to dig for and discover and implement that they are horribly inefficient for an end user compared to other programs that are all-purpose, inviting, and have standard user interfaces.
– – – – – – – – – –
Alternatives to Franzis:
In my case, I use 3 imaging programs, and occasionally a 4th:
1 – free IrfanView grabs screens, can immediately past an image into a blank IrfanView screen, opens any format, including raw, initiates scans, crops and adjusts images, rotate, fine rotate, saves in any format, stitches images together to make a panel, can make stand-alone exe slide shows, copies and pastes into web browsers, batch converts images in epubs to reduce their size and colors and shades of gray to better squeeze as many ensmallened ebooks as possible into limited-storage, limited-screen ebook readers, prints well and flexibly, plus dozens of other uses each of us discovers and depends on.
2 – free Google Picasa scans and remembers any number of drives and images, can import from drives, cards, and cameras, including raw, can rotate, fine rotate, crop, adjust, convert color-to-grayscale via black-and-white photography color filters, make composites and screen-saver slide-shows including web-based images, prints as nice as Photoshop but easier, plus dozens of other uses each of us discovers and depends on.
3 – free * Adobe Photoshop is exceptional for local adjustments, color corrections, intelligent defog sharpening, manipulation of layers, layers for image information and adjustments, and so on, there are endless tutorials from Adobe and independent photographers to help accomplish savvy image manipulation ( * free means there are versions of 2005 CS 2 including Photoshop v9 with lifetime licenses that are still in circulation on the web as released by Adobe at the time that they migrated to later 2007 CS 3 versions which switched to monthly license subscriptions instead ).
4 – no-extra-charge camera-vendor software, all camera companies offer their own software, and or special editions of independent imaging software, these are often the primary tools for interpreting the camera maker’s raw, though there are many other independent programs that interpret raw with a variety of benefits they claim are unique, some raw developers are free, including from Adobe Camera Raw.
– – – – – – – – – –
Back to Franzis NEAT projects … supposedly takes a series of images of the same thing and combines them to eliminate people and replace people with the background information to make any scene look like so many places now look as vacant in CoViD-times.
Because … ?
Maybe rename it CoViD projects? ;-)
There are a variety of alternative ways to eliminate moving things or unwanted things from images.
1 – before capture, using a neutral-density filter, take a long exposure, and anything moving may be eliminated because it becomes an insignificant part of the final image information, we see this in ocean images where the water seem frozen still.
2 – after capture of a series of images, layer them in photoshop and erase the undesired image information form each layer, then collapse the layers to one.
3 – “cloning” and “healing” where existing image information is cloned to cover unwanted details.
1 and 2 requires planning, so if NEAT projects promises to accomplish this without planning, and with a measure of automation, great, but I could not even open a single image to get started, so … Franzis has lost me.
.