Get Hard Value With Easy Photo Tools For Your Mac.

I use a Mac because it has become a valuable tool and the center of my digital life.

Among the dozens of Mac utilities I use regularly is a trio of Easy photo manipulation tools. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not Mac360’s reigning Queen of Cheap-- the Value Vixen title goes to our reigning height leader, Ms. Alexis Kayhill, always the first to find what’s free and good for Mac users.

What’s good for your Mac and your photos is a triple threat from Yellow Mug Software-- Easy Frame, Easy Batch Photo, and Easy Crop.

There’s no shortage of quality Mac software that manipulates your digital images. Even iPhoto has a few features once found only in Adobe’s Photoshop.

The problem is that we can always find something else we’d like to do with our photos that can’t be done in iPhoto, or requires a six month course in Photoshop-- not including the months salary required to buy Photoshop.

EasyFrame
Creating attractive digital frames for your photos is child’s play in Photoshop, can’t even be done in iPhoto, but is easily handled in EasyFrame. Pop in a digital photo from iPhoto, select a frame, export, done.

That’s easy. The frames I like include those softened but rough edges, ovals, rectangles with lines, even the old fashioned photo album corners-- they’re all a single click away with EasyFrame.

EasyCrop
iPhoto does a decent, though not overly intuitive, job of cropping digital photos. It’s just not terribly precise and full of steps to get it right.

What we need is a simple utility that takes all the clumsy steps and makes them intuitive, easy to understand and use, right?

How easy is this? Drag a photo into EasyCrop. Select the area you want to crop. Use the slider for precise control, constrain as you would in iPhoto, then enter a file size.

Preview is live, originals are never modified-- it’s the fastest and most accurate cropping tool I’ve used.

EasyBatchPhoto
No trio of utilities is complete without the third tool, and this one merits extra discussion. EasyBatchPhoto does what you’d expect-- it takes many photos, applies various tasks to each-- hundreds or thousands of photos at a time.

That’s the beauty of batch processing made simple. Yes, Graphic Converter does batch processing, too, but not nearly as simple and straightforward as EasyBatchPhoto.

Once you start using digital photos on your Mac, creating montages, building images for the web, adding frames, adjusting color and file sizes, you see how much time can be devoted to repititious, effort consuming tasks.

EasyBatchPhoto saves you time, lots of time, by converting, resizing, watermarking, adding copyright info, changing file sizes, changing scaling, and much more-- drag and drop and click.

It even works on Photoshop files, in addition to the ever popular JPEGs, PNGs, and TIFFs. My favorite feature is on-the-fly renaming of files.

Yellow Mug has been developing Mac software for many years and has other popular Mac utilities. It’s the value that I look for in a tool that does the job. For example, EasyCrop is $11.95, EasyBatch is $23.95, but all eight tools are less than $40.

Better yet, each can be downloaded and used in try-before-you-buy mode. Not bad, huh?

What’s your favorite photo processing utility for the Mac? Photoshop? Graphic Converter? Fireworks? Share your experience in the Comments section below.

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.

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