Geesh we’re a bunch of whiners!
[ 1 ] First, do we even WANT this software? All it promises is to look over our shoulder and critique a digital image file contents. Yeah, from the promise, I expected it to say, “… her hair is not combed, she’s not smiling enough, her shirt is wrinkled, that would look better if you were in Paris, why don’t you buy a new camera …”
[ 2 ] Registration … there are TWO registrations:
— user registration
— software registration ( twice ! )
Like other companies who are hoping to earn a living at doing what we supposedly value, they want to tether themselves to as many INTERESTED people as possible, rather than spam everyone in the world whether they are interested or not, so they ask us to register with the company, and they trade many benefits for that, including the ability for us to re-download and re-register any of our prior software anytime, including lifetime reinstallation of free giveaway software, even after a system crash, or even onto another computer, multiple computers, at once – those are features we’ve been asking for. And all we have to do is register … then we can click “unsubscribe” on the first email advertisement we receive to keep our relationship with the vendor at a minimum, and under our control. Waaaa – too hard?
[ 3 ] User ID # and software # are NOT NECESSARY, the software installs with a 30-day test, and we can enter the #s later, or just delete the software if we don’t want it. Note: during installation, we insert the software # twice – once during install, and again on the first use. Yeah, the first time I had to do all that arduous multi entry, it drove me nuts that they would be so overwhelmingly complicated … that was over a dozen FREE Franzis programs ago, they’re all like that, and somehow I figured it out and have done it a dozen times already. I overcame my inner whiner.
[ 4 ] The software actually analyzes NOT contents ( “… make her smile more, move her to the rule of thirds, crop out that telephone pole …” ) but it analyzes digital algorithm qualities, and offers to automatically optimize them all – just like auto adjust on any other programs ( including their own other programs ), but with a pre-notification “… this is what I found and this what I’m gonna adjust for you …”, and those qualities are:
— Noise
— Brightness
— Brilliance
— Color
— Detail
— Sharpness
… each of which we can adjust manually if we don’t like the whole suite of auto adjustments.
[ 5 ] Feedback for Franzis – I recommend:
— use numbers on the slider controls to allow us precision in knowing the original value and in knowing the value of our tweaks,
— include a file browser and multiple image batch processing, not just one image at a time,
— include auto renaming and saving to our choice of directory of tweaked digital image files, preserving the originals, along with other batch adjustments, like resizing and so on – in other words, study and at least equal if not improve on FREE IrfanView and FREE Google Picasa,
— make this have standard plugin access from other programs using Photoshop extensions,
— describe your program more accurately ( a friend looking over your shoulder is BOGUS, a friend has no analytical capabilities over the digital analysis and adjustment algorithms you are using, geesh ! ),
— simplify and make friendly your user registration and software registration explanation and scheme,
— make ALL Franzis software integrate into ONE user interface, so when we have 5 Franzis Projects programs, they all work together from ONE user interface – yeah, build Photoshop one module at a time, rather than having them a separate pieces all over our hard drive and program menus.
Thanks for letting us test this and give feedback through SOS SoftwareOnSale, and test the company, which some of us could not overcome, but, like ALL Franzis Projects software, I have NEVER used it again after the initial exploration on the day of first installation … because of the limitations I have listed above that Franzis seems averse to overcome.
Instead, I use:
— FREE IrfanView for individual images, combining multiple images, batch processing, pasting to web threads, and printing,
— FREE Google Picasa for importing from camera cards and camera phones, as my image browser and cataloger, as our screen blanker slide show, and printing,
— FREE Adobe Photoshop ( look it up ) for complex local adjustment to individual images, undistorting unsquare images, and printing.
C’mon, folks show Franzis how sophisticated and knowledgeable ( and how free from whining ) SOS SoftwareOnSale users are – we be da best, and you can too!
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