Photivo Editor's Review

Editing a picture from your personal collection may be a simple task considering the multitude of photo editors that are available on the market. You can choose from a huge offer of similar products, but there are few that can be considered professional tools and can be used for free. But there are exceptions. One of these is Photivo, a free photo editor that stands out in front of other much more popular applications because of its complexity and high level of editing procedure. With Photivo you can work with regular bitmap files but also with RAW files, giving the user a huge amount of control while editing uncompressed images.

Being an open source project, with a huge collection of special effects and other photo tweaks arranged in a non-conformist interface, Photivo looks a bit overwhelming, and demands a steep learning curve in case you want to master it. Even its main objective as an application is unique because unlike Photoshop, CorelDraw or other similar products, with Photivo you cannot deteriorate, view or manage photos in a classic manner. You can only develop the pure form of a single photo by using geometrical parameters, numerous filters, curves based on brightness or colors spectrum. Therefore Photivo is the perfect tool for professional photographers.

Each modification takes a while to be previewed on the original photo, which can become frustrating on weaker PC's if you apply complex operations on a large picture. Additionally on the downside, you are not able to undo or redo an operation. In this situation you can either reset the picture to its original state, or manually save a pipe after each new modification. In this way you can resume any past picture state and re-process it with the new parameters.

I consider Photivo to be a must-have editor for any professional photographer mainly for its complexity and RAW support. But also because there are a lot of people involved in the Photivo project, making the application to grow fast bringing new cool features but also revised ones.

Pluses: free, applies modifications without deteriorating the original file, lots of complex features, RAW support;

Drawbacks/flaws: slow processing speed, needs a steep learning curve to master it, lack of undo/redo system;

In conclusion: Photivo offers a lot more compared to a similar commercial software in terms of photo editing, but its unorthodox implementation makes it a complex application suitable only for average users.

version reviewed: 2011-03-01