The rise and rise of digital photography has really blown up the editing software market, so there’s no shortage of tools out there to make your images look cooler or more professional. The interesting thing about this Perfect Effects 8 pack is it’s available in a number of different formats, depending on your needs.
For one thing you can have it as a standalone program for Windows, but if you already have photo editing software like Lightroom, Photoshop or Elements you can download the package as a plugin. You need to give you email address to access the download, but that’s it, and you can always select a safe address to use.
The pack comes with 170 one click effects, and there are a ton of adjustments you can make to each one. You can also select layers mode, instead of JPG, which will actually output a full blown Photoshop PSD which can be edited later on. It’s not the easiest tool to use, you’ll have to be familiar with a fair number of editing terms, but it’s effective.
You get a nice set of categories to choose from, including HDR (of course!), Vignette and a range of borders, and you can save your favorites and presets for repeated use. The only thing we didn’t like is the fact that by default the presets save as a number, not the name of the original effect you used, which makes it tricky to remember what was what.
Anyway, there’s also a Version 9 coming out next month, which promises to offer up more sophistication for the same low low price, and if you need more, you can always pay for the full and premium versions of all their free software.