Snapshot Software Review [Mac]

The advent of digital cameras initially caused, and is still responsible for, a tsunami of excitement. The excitement is enjoyed not so much for experienced photographers but for the vast numbers of people out there who just like photographs, not for their intrinsic value, but for what you can do with photos: embellish a coffee mug with shots of the family; dress up a calendar; personalize a mouse mat … the list goes on.

Snapshot by LateNiteSoft is a fascinating piece of Mac software that addresses this need and gives the photo lover a tool to take personal images to a new level. It’s easy to use, relatively cheap — and a heap of fun to use.
So, instead of sitting in front of a supermarket photo machine, you can now do many of the tricky tasks at your place with the home printer.

It presents you with a work screen, onto which you can import your favourite photo. Once in view you can then embellish it with speech bubbles, insert text captions, then add borders to frame your image.
The app gives you control over final print size, anywhere from 3×5 inches all the way up to A4 (21×29.7cm) and there’s even a custom size option; I tried the latter and managed to kick it up to 80x60cm with no sign that I had hit the ceiling!

The beauty of Snapshot is that it gives you a WYSIWYG preview on screen of the eventual print result. It works on the image in a non-destructive fashion, so you can mash around to your heart’s content.

It can automatically fit as many pictures onto a page as possible or even print contact sheets.

Speech bubble: three in all … place them where you want. Somewhat unusual is the manner in which you alter the size of the balloon: the overall size can be altered of course and the shape: wider, fatter and with a short or long tail.
Text: as long as you like a simple sans serif font you will be satisfied. You cannot alter the size but the developers advise that this feature will be added in a future release.

Border styles: this is where the real fun began. There’s a whole collection of styles: blue, pastel or pink dot surround; green, pastel or pink multistripes, photo corner border; Fun Times … and much more. I counted a total of 21 different styles.

There’s a pile of control sliders that can alter the presentation of the main image: overall exposure, contrast, brightness, saturation and sharpness can be adjusted. This level of control you will find extremely useful when assembling a montage of image, bubbles and borders.

When you’ve finished, you can print directly from the app or choose to save the ‘creation’ as a JPEG or TIFF file.
Haven’t had so much fun for years!

… and then I took a closer look and found odd artefacts popping up in the frame area. Take a look. Let’s hope these will be attended to in the future.

System: Mac OSX 10.4 to 10.6.
Price: US14.95. The demo version will allow 10 days of free usage.
Web: http://latenitesoft.com/