Adebis Photo Editor Works Fine, But Fails to Distinguish Itself

Adebis joins the crowded world of photo editing software with its not-so-creatively titled Photo Editor. Although competent, the $40 Adebis Photo Editor offers little more than free programs and a narrower range of tools than other comparably-priced packages. Whether it's worth keeping after the 30-day free trial is largely a matter of taste and personal workflow.

Adebis Photo Editor gives the user a variety of tools that control the exposure and color balance of the photo. You can fix the brightness, contrast, hue, luminance, saturation and temperature. The program also allows you to set the white point and adjust each color individually, and it includes a red-eye fix. But providing so many tools that do almost the same thing seems unnecessary. The average point-and-shooter doesn't need to set the hue, color temperature, luminance and saturation individually. In fact, when I adjusted each of these attributes, I found little visual difference between each setting. And when I let the program automatically fix some photos taken with a point and shoot set on auto, the software hardly adjusted the image at all.

Adebis Photo Editor also includes tools to reduce noise, sharpen, and fix lens problems like barrel distortions. And you can do standard photo manipulations like cropping, rotating and flipping the picture. The cropping tool is robust, allowing you to crop based paper size or screen resolution, as well as manually.

For those who want a lot of control over the look of their photos, Adebis Photo Editor will provide it. But given that many free programs, such as Picasa 3 and Windows Live Photo Gallery--as well as the software that often comes bundled with digital cameras, scanners and printers--already do a pretty good job of fixing lighting and exposure problems, it's not worth paying $40 for a limited range of tools that overlap each other in value. Other photo editing software, like ArcSoft PhotoImpression 6, take a broader approach, offering photo management tools, clipart, text boxes, and video and music management. Most everyday photographers will find more value for their $40 with those types of packages. Try the 30-day trial version to see if this particular set of tools is worth the money for you.

Note: This 30-day free trial version saves only jpegs, whereas the full version will save tiff, png and bmp files.