Perfect Photo Suite 8: Browse and Enhance
- Selecting Shots with the Browse Module
- Using Perfect Enhance
- Working with Presets
- New Retouching Tools
- Exposure, Color, and Detail Controls
- Final Thoughts
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Perfect Photo Suite 8 is the latest collection of picture enhancement tools from onOne Software, and has been designed to provide users with a more tightly integrated workflow than previous versions. For the first time, all of the modules in this application take advantage of the same user interface, which is sporting a new look for version 8. This makes it easier to find the features you need, and easier to learn the suite as a whole, as similar conventions for previewing images and changing settings are used throughout.
To get started, find the Perfect Photo Suite 8 app icon (looks like this: 
) and double-click it. This will open a single window where all of the work can be done, regardless of which module or tool you want to use.
Selecting Shots with the Browse Module
At top right (see Figure 1), you will find module buttons for the entire suite: Browse, Layers, Enhance, Portrait, Effects, B&W, Mask, and Resize. The selective blurring effects previously found in the Focal Point plugin are now located within the Perfect Effects module.
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Figure 1 The new Browse module in Perfect Photo Suite 8 brings a familiar look, easy file navigation, as well as access to the rest of the suite.
By default, the window should open into Browse mode. This new browser was designed to make it easy for us to do two things:
- Find the photos we want to work with (and quickly open them into the appropriate module)
- View some basic metadata from our image files
The browser’s layout and appearance is similar to Lightroom, so anyone who has used that application should feel right at home. The minimalist approach and self-explanatory controls make it easy to use right away.
The Info panel (top left) will display the selected photo’s basic metadata—mainly EXIF information from the camera—while the Sources panel has several built-in options to view photos that reside both on local hard drives, and online. Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, and SkyDrive are all examples of popular cloud storage solutions that are supported by Perfect Photo Suite 8.
If you choose to view photos stored with an online storage service, and have installed folder(s) for that service in the default location, the onOne Browser will know where to look automatically. If you used a custom folder location, you will be given a dialog box that allows you to “locate” the folder manually. Figure 2
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Figure 2 If you store your photos online, the onOne Browse module makes it easy to integrate with popular services like Dropbox and iCloud Photo Stream.
One final aspect of the Browse that’s worth noting is that while you can select multiple thumbnails and then batch-process those images using presets from any of the selected modules, you cannot edit any aspect of your pictures (including metadata) in the Browser module. Unfortunately, you cannot delete any files you create within the suite, either. Unlike Lightroom’s Library module, the Browse module is a browsing and photo selection tool, not a tool for organizing your photos and applying metadata.