Image Analyzer offers features you wouldn't expect for free

Let’s be frank: most free image editors are dull. They tend to offer the same style of interface, the same basic functionality, with little to distinguish them for the competition. That may be fine for beginners, but if you’re a more experienced user then you might sometimes wish for something more.

There are more interesting alternatives around, though, and Image Analyzer is a particularly good example. It’s far from perfect, but if you’re looking for a photo editor with a little extra features and functionality then the program could keep you busy for a very long time.

This starts by offering you more control over many common editing features. Resize an image, say, and you don’t just get one resampling method: Image Analyzer provides 8. Standard filters such as Smooth or Sharpen have multiple parameters to help deliver the best results. Even the Automatic Colour Correct tool – which you might be forgiven for thinking was, well, automatic – demands you choose from three possible algorithms, before enhancing your image.

Image Analyzer also includes functions which you won’t necessarily find in free tools at all. The program can deskew some images in a click, for instance. Deconvolution support tries to improve blurred and out-of-focus images, and you don’t just get a bunch of built-in filters: a User-Defined option means you’re able to customize them to suit your own needs.

Image-editing experts will find plenty of more advanced option to explore. There’s support for applying Distance, Fourier and discrete cosine transformations, for example. A Lens Distortion Correction filter can work well sometimes, and there are some very interesting statistical image enhancement tools.

And if all this isn’t enough, you can install plugins to help create 3D images, perform content-aware resizing, support fractal interpolation (so you can resize images without smoothing them), support HDR images, add text and vector graphics to an image, and more. (See the author’s site for the full list, and to download whatever you need.)

If there are problems here, it’s that Image Analyzer doesn’t make any concessions whatsoever to ease of use. Menus with titles like “Morphological operations” won’t entice all users, other descriptions are hopelessly vague (“update with expression”), and there’s no significant documentation to fill in the blanks, either.

Image editing beginners should probably stay away, then. But if you want something more than the typical photo editor, and you’re willing to invest the time in learning how everything works, then Image Analyzer has plenty to explore. (And if nothing else, it’s certainly not dull.)

Photo Credit: Lilya/Shutterstock