Zoner Photo Studio X Download 19.2409.2.592 + Fix

CONS

• Slower than the competition for many standard operations
• Occasional unexpected shutdowns
• Lacks support for some newer camera models

Interface

Zoner Photo Studio X Full Version interface is visually pleasing and has an efficient layout for organizing and editing photos, though tabs and layers can make it more complex than programs like Lightroom and Skylum Luminar.

Its tabbed interface bears a resemblance to that of a web browser. As with other photo apps, Zoner uses a dark gray interface, letting your photos take center stage. The left panel gives access to source material, be it on your hard drive, in your Zoner catalog, on a smartphone, on Facebook, or on OneDrive. I appreciate that you can hide this panel with one click on a triangle icon, as you can in Lightroom Classic.

The photo thumbnails take up the large center section of the screen, and a right-side panel switches among Manager, Develop, Editor, and Create modes. Editor mode supports layers, while Develop will be familiar to photographers who use Lightroom’s identically named mode, and Create is where you produce photo books, calendars, prints, slideshow videos, and more.

You can zoom in and out on an image with a simple mouse wheel spin, and buttons take you instantly to 100 percent, fit, or Fit Shorter Side. Double-clicking on an image conveniently takes you back to the thumbnail grid view of your photo collection.

One interface quibble is that double-clicking on adjustment sliders doesn’t reset the adjustment, as it does in Lightroom and Capture One. A curved back arrow appears when you change a slider, but it undoes all adjustments in the group—not the most helpful option. Another disappointment is that, though there’s a Compare view for multiple images, it doesn’t work in the full Develop mode. You can customize which control sets appear in Develop, which cleans up the interface of things you don’t use much.

Import and Organize

You don’t need to import photos, since you can open any image file on your system from the folder tree, but Zoner Photo Studio X  Online has an Import button at the bottom of the Manager panel to get photos off an SD card.

You can copy or move at import, and automatically apply naming and keyword tags. One can’t automatically apply any effects, such as autocorrections, at import. If you don’t import a photo, but instead open it from the folder structure, you can view either a Fast or Full Quality preview. The latter, as you might expect, takes a bit longer to load.

The search box, just above the source list, lets you search any text in the photo file and filter based on format (raw, jpeg, or other), rating, color label, or GPS coordinates. You can’t, however, filter by camera model or lens, or use AI-powered object search like in Lightroom.

Any workflow app designed for serious digital photographers can import and work with raw camera files, since this offers more correction possibilities. Try recovering a blown-out sky from a JPG, and you’ll get nowhere. Zoner does a decent job of importing raw files, but I find that Lightroom and Capture One provide more detail on initial import.

The keyword tagging tool is a basic text-entry box, with none of Lightroom’s presets and keyword memory features. There’s also no face recognition feature like you get in Lightroom and CyberLink PhotoDirector.

The Location view entry on the left panel uses embedded GPS data to show only photos shot in certain locales. You can also select a folder or group of images and drag them onto a map to apply location data.

Some newer raw formats, like those from Canon and Nikon’s recent mirrorless full-frame cameras (including the Canon EOS R and Nikon Z7), were not supported at the time of testing, though those models have been around for over a year. A couple of organization options I like are missing, too—the ability to view the last import batch and to view recently edited photos.

Image Adjustments

Zoner Photo Studio X Activation key Develop panel offers the full panoply of photo adjustment tools, which you switch between with buttons above the slider controls. White Balance, Exposure, Color, Tone Curves, Sharpness, and Noise reduction are all expectedly present.

Extras include a Color Shift tool that lets you change the color you sample in your photo using an eyedropper. You also get Clarity and Dehaze sliders, single-shot HDR, Vignetting, and Grain.

The spring 2020 update added new color tools, including color shift, split toning, and primary color shifting. An eyedropper tool in the Hue correction shows a line on the image you can slide back and forth to change the hue of pixels in the selected color range. You can limit the range of this tool to, say, blue hues for the sky.

For more detailed work, the Advance panel shows a color wheel with several control points letting you extend or constrict the range of colors affected. The outer ring represents the new color that the selected range will take.

The Auto correction button works as well as in any photo app, and a slew of presets let you apply corrections and effects in one shot. The presets show you the color and light settings they change, so you could use them as a starting point for your own effects. As with many of the application’s functions, however, it takes longer than competitors: One shot took about six seconds for auto-correction to appear.

The crop tool is the good kind: It lets you either bring the crop in from the edges or start a new crop by drawing inside the image preview. The same tool lets you rotate, but there’s no auto horizon detection like you get in Lightroom. New for the Spring update is Perspective Crop; this distorts an image based on where you mark the crop corners, for example straightening out a non-horizontal horizon.

Conclusion

Zoner Photo Studio X Download 19.2409.2.592 is a full photo-editing toolkit, with workflow, corrections, effects, online galleries, print ordering, and even Photoshop-like layer editing, but it’s slower than competitors and lacks some state-of-the-art features.