A giveaway today on BDJ, it *appears* to be an update to the version given away on GOTD a little over a year ago, going by the dates of files in the program's folder. The activation from last year still worked for me -- I did not have to activate this new copy. Clicking on activation from the menu &/or the about box don't give activation status, but clicking on the key icon says it's already activated.
The app itself is almost portable -- everything's contained to the program's folder, and the only registry entries are the uninstall key & a key with the registration/activation number. Assuming you edit photos [or want to], the potential strength of the app is that it gives you controls that are a bit similar to some of those in Lightroom or Photoshop's Camera Raw, and they can be Extremely useful. Unfortunately, Photo Effects also has enough missing features that many won't want to bother using it... in a nutshell, and IMHO of course, if you don't mind a bit of tedium in pursuit of perfection, read on -- otherwise this is one app to skip.
In Photoshop it's routine to go into Camera Raw, adjusting sliders for highlights, shadows, exposure etc. There's probably nothing you couldn't accomplish elsewhere in P/Shop, but it's just so fast & convenient. Now Photo Effects is Not an image editor, so you'll still need one for everything else you want/need to do to a photo, and since it doesn't offer a plugin, you'll have to bounce between that editing software & Photo Effects. Worse, Photo Effects saves images in the .png format, so no .tif or .psd files with layers, or even .jpg for the final image. You can work around that, saving a single layer, opening that in Photo Effects, saving that new version, opening it in your editing app as a new layer, but then Photo Effects itself is missing one thing that can make it a PITA... what's nice about sliders is you can drag them left to right, see what their effect is, and then zero in on the best setting. Oftentimes though, there is no best setting, so you want to leave whatever adjustment alone and move on to the next slider or group of sliders, e.g. skip Sharpening & move on to Local Contrast. And that's a problem because while there is a global undo, the sliders have No reset -- no way to turn a setting off other than to put the slider back just where you found it, and that's very often not at the extreme left [that would be too easy], but somewhere in the middle, and sometimes it's not even 0 or 50 or something like that -- you better hope you wrote it down.
vertexshare[.]com/photo-effects.html
giveawayoftheday[.]com/photo-effects/
