Free ( even though it’s first words on screen are “thank you for purchasing” ) Sagelight Image Editor 4.4h(b) is a PHOTO EDITOR, one image file at a time, with an incredible array of tweaking, by an incredible number of algorithms.

The Image, Rotate/Straighten Horizon, Any Angle/Straighten Horizon tools are terrific – we can drag the alignment grid to wherever it best matches something horizontal ( or vertical, or any angle ) in the picture, then drag the rotation controls, then smart crop to eliminate blank angles around the image borders ( but it needs an “auto find and straighten horizon” feature nevertheless ).

The More Functions, Polarizer is fun – few programs have the same effect labeled and controllable as such.

More Functions, Increase Low Saturation is also great in that it only addresses colors that are not already popping – other program’s ‘saturation’ controls tend to overdue already bright colors, so this is a treat.

Many controls have [ More Options ] and more sliders to offer precision, selection, and over-the-top enhancements if you want to go there.

Free Sagelight Image Editor 4 is an incredibly well-thought-out program, with tons of features and benefits, I can imagine organizing it better, simpler, btu it would be an overwhelming job to try to direct from the comments here.

For example, there are only 5 things we can control, all tools and effects fit within those 5 controls.

But hey, they have 11 prime menu choices, with similar controls spread across each, no organization according to, well, I can’t tell how they are organized – by amount of struggle involved in manipulating them? – so that’s how we gotta learn the program.

Good luck finding a setting twice, especially over time time, that’s why I added SPECIFIC notes above – take your own notes, you’re gonna need ’em.

And they all are explained with pop-ups, so there’s a lot of support for learning built right into the program, so BE PATIENT and READ EVERYTHING, I’m re-reading everything each time I load the program because there’s so much to learn – note, some help explanations pops UNDER the control so we can’t read the entire help message.

There are a lot of “you gotta get familiar with a whole new way of doing things” challenges, and some references are incomplete, like, references to buttons don’t show where the buttons are – I can’t find whatever buttons are mentioned.

The fonts are small, and the letters are ambiguous, hard to read – in a world of gorgeous free SCREEN fonts, and user-selectable fonts and sizes, this should be easy to overcome for the developer.

The program shortcut is under “19th Parallel”, so good luck finding the program again later.

It crashes a lot, HDR variations, noise reduction variations, anything complex crashes, even help screens crash, but when I reopen the program, it does SOMETIMES offer to reload the last image file from before it crashed, though any attempted edits are lost.

It’s gotten itself into situations where ALL menu pull down options are grayed out, I can do nothing, there is no indication on screen what I can do ( look for an “apply/cancel” button somewhere ? ).

This ‘feels’ like all of the free Franzis programs packed into one!

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Suggestion to the developer: make it as good and complete as free Google Picasa, then improve upon that.

So, missing is a file browser with preview, image catalog maintenance, edit multiple images, copy edits that were applied to one picture to other pictures, print more than one image, page layout for multiple pictures, import images from directories, import from camera cards, import from cameras, combine images side by side, stacked images ( double exposure and focus-stacking ), mosaic of images, detailed image information does not stay on screen during editing, we can’t see a film strip of prior and subsequent images in a sequence to help us compare and select our favorite, slideshow, collage, movie, and so on, are features NOT in Sagelight Image Editor 4 as far as I can discern.

This is NOT an image file MANAGEMENT program, this is a one-image-at-a-time photo editor, tweaker, adjuster ( and not graphics images for business and advertising communication, I saw no text or drawing options ), and most controls are global across the entire image, unlike free Adobe Photoshop that allows tweaking individual selected areas independently.

Considering that we’ll need a different program to NAMAGE our photo COLLECTION, and considering that such image collection management programs all come with their own editors, then free Sagelight Image Editor 4 has a tough challenge to overcome getting us to add it to our arsenal of digital photo image collection management programs.

So there you have it – free Google Picasa does importing, printing, a lot of adjustments options, exporting, text, batch work, applying edits to entire directories, a whole suite of image management and image adjustment features, so start there, I recommend that all new programs start where prior programs left off, do everything prior programs do, THEN Sagelight Image Editor 4 enhancements will have a solid platform of it’s own on which to stand and offer improvement, features, and benefits that go beyond.

Thanks.

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