
It makes noise removal straightforward and intuitive.

The Tilt and Shift tools also try their best, but struggle to recreate the effects of a genuine T & S lens convincingly.Īlong with Tonality, this is the best part of the package. If you really do need to reduce the depth of field in an image, Focus is still worth a try, however.

The Focus tools recall the Radial Filter interface in Lightroom but don’t feel as intuitive. The background blur/bokeh tools are ok to an extent but never look as convincing as getting it right in camera with a wide aperture or long lens, and you often end up with a synthetic and over-processed look. MacPhun has made a brave stab at recreating bokeh (background blur) and other cool focus effects with this tool, but it’s a bit like the curate’s egg – good in parts. For more complex removal jobs you will need to dive deeper into the image with the tools provided, but otherwise, healing is a one click process. Simply paint or draw around the object you need removed and click once to remove – it’s as simple as that, with no silly arrows or sampling involved. While Photoshop has made it a lot easier to remove unwanted objects from images or carry out other healing duties, the Lightroom tools can be exasperating for less experienced users, so Snapheal puts Adobe to shame here. That said, Tonality lacks the intuitive Structure control point system of the Nik software, so Tonality, while very good, isn’t quite up to the standard of Nik yet. Crisp is great for bringing out tone and detail, and as with Silver Efex Pro, you can carefully adjust Structure for great results. I found Crisp to be good general preset, and I could happily ignore many of the others. Again, a first pass of the presets can generate some rather crude results, so careful adjustment is necessary. When it comes to mono or duotone conversions, Tonality is pretty good. That said, I can’t ever imagine using Blue Lense or Ancona in a million years. It’s best to regard the presets here as a starting point, so don’t be put off by the initial results on some of the presets. Once you apply a preset you can also fine-tune it, which makes for a very intuitive way of working.Īt first glance FX Photo Studio looks a bit heavy handed and garish, like many other cheap editing programs and apps out there, but it’s worth persevering with. A wide range of one-click presets are provided for instant tweaks, or you can carefully edit each image individually. There are two main ways of working with the apps in CK. Let’s briefly look at each app in the package, before considering whether CK is worth the cash in this age of the keenly priced Adobe Creative Cloud for Photographers and the entirely gratis Nik collection. FX Photo Studio is a general editing tool with the emphasis on special effects Snapheal enables you to remove unwanted objects in images Focus is all about recreating focus effects such as background blur or tilt and shift Noiseless is a noise removal app Tonality is chiefly designed for black and white conversion Intensify is a souped-up contrast adjuster for more eye-catching images. MacPhun has released several packages of editing apps, from a Starter’s Edition to Pro Kit Premium, but we’re going to be looking at Creative Kit (CK) 2016, likely to be the most popular iteration.ĬK basically consists of six apps.


#MACPHUN CREATIVE KIT PRO 2016 SOFTWARE#
If you’re not familiar with the name, MacPhun specialises in photo editing software for the Mac – did you see what they did with the name there? Windows users, alas, will have to look elsewhere, which seems a bit unfair in 2016, but them’s the breaks. Not only has Google made its superb Nik collection freely available for download, but MacPhun has gone ahead and combined its well-regarded editing apps into one reasonably priced package, called Creative Kit 2016. It’s turning into a good year for image editing.
#MACPHUN CREATIVE KIT PRO 2016 FOR MAC#
Can this bundle of image-editing apps for Mac really take on Adobe and Nik? Geoff Harris sees how it shapes up
