Will Woodgate: Analog released by Realmac Software

A superb little image editor I've been Beta testing for the past few months got released today. It's called Analog and is developed by Realmac Software, the same company behind other prestigious software titles like RapidWeaver, LittleSnapper and Courier. Analog is a remarkably simple application that lets you to drag and drop images into a placeholder and choose from a range of professional looking filters and frame effects. Then these processed images can be saved locally on your hard drive, attached to an email or published to various online 'clouds' like Flickr, Picasa or Facebook for the world to see.

Do we need yet another Mac-exclusive image editor? Well put yourself in my position. Two weeks ago I shot over 1000 photographs on my 2 year-old Sony A350 DSL, only to find later on in iPhoto that the camera had developed a fault, and I had white over-exposed bands running across the bottom third of my pictures. While I battle with the paper trail at Sony UK to have my camera repaired for less than the quoted £300, it left me with the problem of what to do with these imperfect images. Rather than trash the entire shoot, I tried several of them through Analog. In quite a number of examples, it turned the bad images into 'artistically refined' images. So it was great to find a way to recycle less-than-perfect pictures. Likewise I had a mess around with some of the effects in Analog, and found that it gave me some inspirational ideas for future creative projects. Even if you drop in a picture taken on a 1MB camera phone, the finished image is pretty impressive.

As mentioned already, using Analog is really easy. Basically you have a single window entitled 'Analog' (which can be set to fullscreen on Lion). You then drag and drop a suitable image into the central placeholder. On the right is a panel where you can choose one filter effect and one border effect. Confirmation of an effect applied is given via a low audible tone and the image preview refreshes almost instantly. Analog also provides basic controls to rotate an image and crop it. Images can be shared by clicking the share button and selecting a destination like Mail, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa or Tumblr. Analog remembers your login credentials for these services, so uploading images to 'the cloud' becomes a one step process.

From my testing, Analog was rock-stable and flew along at unstoppable speeds. It is certainly a very nifty application, and as the marketing blurb suggests, it really does "give your photos some soul". I'd imagine most people could find a use for it, and at $7.99 for a limited time, it is practically free. My single hope is that Realmac will release a public API, to allow third-party developers to create addon filter and frame effects. That would really push this application into a league of its own.