Product Reviews

Launching a heavyweight image editor such as Photoshop is overkill when time is of the essence, such as sending a Jpeg to an iChat contact. Enter ImageWell, which trims feature bloat in favour of getting the job done quickly. This palette-sized application sits at the Desktop's edge, ready to jump into action. Drop an image onto the well, make adjustments and drag it back out to the Finder or another application as a Jpeg, Tiff or PNG image. The most basic features allow for scaling by percentage or to an exact size, and the application of text or image watermarks. There's even a web-friendly random filename generator.

The size of output is shown in the window, so you can adjust Jpeg compression and, when publishing, locations can be set up to publish to iDisk and other servers, such as FTP and a few photo-sharing sites.

Drop several images into the well to batch process them - with scaling options that distort, crop or add borders and set the size. Again, the batch's results can be speedily sent to a predefined location.

The editing mode focuses on the essential features for creating montages from files and the clipboard. Text and decorative shapes can be added, and objects sent forwards and backwards to restack them. Other tools cater for colour adjustments, drop shadows, opacity and objects can even be cropped and masked with a selection of shapes.

Familiar handles on objects control scaling and rotation, and a few extra ones control the radius of curved corners or the number of points in a star. Modifier keys maintain the speedy process, allowing objects to scale form the centre or edge.

The favourites bin is a great place to store objects and keep consistent presentation across your website. Changes are non-destructive until output, so you can adjust crops and masks if they don't look right. ImageWell only saves to flat formats though, which is a pity if you want to return to a montage to add new images to it.

Plenty of thought has gone into ensuring that using ImageWell is quick from start to finish. It's very affordable and, aside from minor issues in editing mode, its tools are just rich enough to get the job done.