Editing Tools

Rotation and Flipping

Resize

Resampling Methods

Content-Aware Resize

Canvas Size

Canvas and Borders

Specific Crop

Text Overlay

Image Overlay

AI Remove Background

Change Color Depth

ICC Profiles

Covert File Format

Convert to Web JPEG

Batch Filter

Rotation and Flipping

Rotate Left, Rotate Right, Rotate by 180°

Select all the pictures to rotate and use the appropriate function. The edit is made immediately to all selected pictures. When you use this function from the Browser on images, it is, when possible, lossless. The menu items for this function are the same in the Editor as in the Browser.

These options are also available for video files. Here the rotation is shown only in Zoner Studio, but it is lossless. Video-orientation information is recorded in an XMP helper file. The original video file thus remains unchanged.

Specific Rotation

Select the pictures to be rotated to a specific angle and use Specific Rotation…. The menu item for this function is the same in the Editor as in the Browser.

You can set which Background color is used to fill out the empty spaces in the corners after you rotate.

Flipping Pictures

To flip (mirror) a picture, use Flip Horizontally or Flip Vertically. When you use this function in the Manager module on images, it is, when possible, lossless. This function is also available in Editor.

Adjusting Rotation via EXIF

Some digital cameras have a special sensor that can detect the camera’s orientation during a shot and store this directly inside of a photo. In certain PC programs, the photo is then shown unrotated. In Zoner Studio, the photograph is rotated based on this flag automatically. To ensure the photos are correctly rotated in every program, select them in the Mnager and use this function. Whenever possible, this operation is lossless.

Rotating to an Orientation

Use this function to rotate a picture or pictures to an orientation – either landscape or portrait. You can choose the direction of the rotation. Whenever possible, this operation is lossless.

Setting the EXIF Orientation Flag

Use this function to change the rotation flag that advanced digital cameras record in pictures’ EXIF information. This function does not change the picture itself.

Resize

Use this function to set a picture’s size in pixels. You can also use it to set a physical size if you first tell the program a desired number of dots per inch (DPI) for the picture.

To set the Width and Height to resize to, enter them in the box. Normally they are set in pixels, but if needed, use the controls to set them in percent, centimeters, millimeters, or inches instead. Digital pictures’ actual dimensions are always in pixels, so sizes in centimeters, millimeters, or inches are relative to a dots per inch (DPI) value. Use the DPI control to set this value. It tells printers, etc. how many pixels should be used per inch during printing, display, etc. The appropriate DPI setting to use depends on how the resized picture will be used. For screen display, 96 DPI is fine. For print, at least 150 is recommended. The best choice of DPI also depends on specifics like printer quality, paper quality, etc.

Leave the Keep proportions option on to make the program automatically set one dimension (width/height) based on your value for the other one, so that the picture isn’t distorted. To enter Width and Height independently, turn this option off. Sharpen reduces the harm caused by the loss of information involved in shrinking a picture. (Major shrinking can cause a loss of detail, and mild sharpening can lessen this problem.) To set the method used for resizing, use Method.

If multiple pictures are selected, you can restrict the function so it only shrinks or only stretches pictures, using the control named Mode.

Save image only saves disk space by stripping away any EXIF or other picture information that may be in the resized pictures.

More information

Resampling Methods

Resampling Methods

There are very many ways to resample a digital picture—to redraw it using more or fewer pixels, either permanently or just on-screen. These methods differ in how they decide on values for the pixels in the new version of the picture, and in how many pixels in the original are analyzed for such decisions. There is no “silver bullet” – each method has its advantages and disadvantages. It all depends on what is being resampled, and why.

One way in which resampling methods differ is the “sharpness” of the output picture. When you are shrinking pictures, some methods, like bicubic and supersampling, lead to a mildly blurry image. Thus it is a good idea to mildly sharpen after resampling in such cases.

• Nearest neighbor – the simplest and fastest method; it does not use any interpolation, but rather evaluates each of the original’s pixels on their own; a bad choice for photos, but irreplaceable for technical drawings with hairlines.
• Bilinear – the simplest kind of interpolation; uses the relative sum of the four nearest pixels; fast and generally good when shrinking a picture.
• Bicubic – relatively advanced interpolation; uses the 16 nearest pixels; interpolates values along a cubic curve; suitable for both stretching and shrinking (if the picture is sharpened afterwards).
• Hermite – another type of interpolated curve; uses the four nearest neighboring pixels.
• Bell – gives a very “soft” image; useful for pictures with noise.
• Mitchell – an excellent combination of speed and quality; uses the 16 nearest pixels; has a “self-sharpening” effect.
• Lanczos – processor-intensive; pixels are interpolated using a special curve simulating the real dissemination of information; 36 pixels from the original are used per output pixel; has a strong “self-sharpening effect”; most useful when stretching pictures; can cause unaesthetic grid-like artifacts during shrinking due to the sharpening effect.
• Supersampling – designed only for shrinking pictures; uses the weighted average of all the pixels that are lost during shrinking. Generally gives the best results for photos, because it works with all pixels in a photo. Can suffer from unsharpness, but this can be solved by mild sharpening afterwards.
• Change DPI only – only changes the DPI value. When the DPI setting is changed, the program automatically calculates at what size the photo can be printed at the current DPI.

More information

What Resolution Should You Use for Printing?

Content-aware Resize

Use this function to make the program resize a picture by adding/removing rectangular areas in a "content-aware" way. Content-aware resizing goes easy on content-filled, "important" parts of the picture, while deforming harder-to-notice, "unimportant" parts. This is useful when you want to change a picture's ratio of sides without having to either deform it or perform a crop that may remove important parts. Content-aware resizing resizes the picture and can change its overall ratio of sides, while leaving its important parts untouched.

Set a width and height and the program will analyze the picture to find its important regions, the ones that should be preserved. It then uses that analysis as a basis for choosing rectangles to add to/remove from the picture to bring it to the desired size. Quality sets the speed and precision of this analysis.

Click Mark Regions… to "inform" the program about which areas (e.g. faces or signs) should definitely keep their original proportions, and ones that may freely be distorted (e.g. skies or unbroken backgrounds), if auto-detection doesn't treat them properly.

Note that the program treats these regions only as very strong suggestions, not as an iron rule. Thus in extreme cases, when other unimportant areas have "run out," the above-mentioned deformation rectangles can lead through even the areas you have marked as important.

Canvas Size

This function resizes a picture by cropping it or adding a colored border.

If the Relative is not checked, then the Width and Height values determine the picture’s size. To set the new size via the increase/decrease in size, rather than setting the new size directly, use the Relative option. (To set a decrease in size, use a negative value.) To set where to “anchor” the whole operation, use the Image alignment control. Increasing the canvas size adds a border around the picture.

Only in Develop Module, Click Color to set its color using the Windows color picking window. Click the eyedropper to set the color by clicking a color in the picture.

Fill in background using blurred image – turn on this option to fill in the canvas background with a blurred image when stretching out the canvas. To fine-tune this blurring process, use these options: Blurring Strength | Zoom | Color blending. This option is in the Editor, within the Canvas Size tool.

Canvas and Borders

Use this mode to give a picture a frame made up of up to three rectangles with a color of your choice, in several modes:

Choosing a Mode

The Frame mode increases the size of the picture by the size of the frames, and thus always preserves all picture data. The Preserve size mode covers the original picture with the frames on all sides, and thus preserves the original size of the picture. The Preserve ratio option covers the original picture with the frames in such a way as to preserve the original ratio of sides.

Entry Method and Units

When you use the Canvas and borders entry mode, you can add an inner or outer frame neighboring the border you set. The width of these frames may never be larger than that of the border. If you set a larger width, the border will adjust automatically. If you choose Three lines, then you will enter three lines with various widths that will surround the picture.

You can enter their widths directly as pixels, or as relatively, in percent. Entering them in relative terms is very useful when you are doing batch work, not all photos have the same size (e.g. due to cropping), and you want the frames to have a unified look.

When you check the Symmetrical option, you will be working directly with the width for one side only; the other sides will be calculated automatically.

Specific Crop

Use this to crop whole batches of pictures at once using predefined criteria.

Use the Height and Width fields to set the crop size in pixels. Use the square of dots to anchor the crop to a corner, side, or the middle. Use Preserve ratio to ensure that the cropped version of each picture will have the same ratio of sides as the original did.

Use the Ratio of Sides dropdown to set the crop to a fixed size in pixels or a fixed ratio of sides. Click Swap Values (shown between the two sizes or ratios) to swap the two values, switching the crop from Portrait to Landscape or vice-versa.

Text Overlay

The most common use for the Place Text function is adding a copyright watermark to a photo, or adding descriptive text near one of its edges.

In this window, you tell the program what text to place, what settings it should have, its position, offset, and transparency. You can set the text’s size either absolutely (in pixels) or relatively (in percent of the picture’s size). Besides static, fixed text, you can make use of the program’s metadata tokens feature in this window. This feature enables you to make use of information about a picture, so you can e.g. store the time a photo was taken inside the photo. If you have never worked with metadata tokens before, we strongly recommend that you read the Metadata Tokens topic before beginning work with it.

Once ou have added text to a picture and saved that picture, the change is irreversible—the text cannot be changed or removed afterwards.

More information

How to Add Text to Your Photos

Image Overlay

This function is most often used to place a small logo (a watermark) or the photographer’s signature in a photo.

In the window, you choose which picture to place, its Position, its Rotation, its Indentation away from its base position, whether or not to Use transparency stored in overlaid image (relevant when placing GIF and PNG pictures) and if desired an overall Transparency. There is also a Use as watermark option via which you can use the placed image as a mask with a shadow; use the Light source control to affect the shadow’s direction.

If the picture is too large, then you can use the If needed, shrink overlay to fit option, or Resample it to a certain percentage of its original size.

More information

Sign Your Photos: 4 Tips on Watermarking Your Photographs

AI Remove Background

The AI Remove Background feature is used to automatically remove the background from an image using artificial intelligence. This feature is optimized for product photography.

There are three options available that determine what happens to the background:

• Replace background with transparency – When this option is selected, the background is removed and becomes transparent. After using this option, the file must be saved in PNG format to preserve the transparency.
• Replace background with color – This option allows you to choose a color to replace the background with.
• Set background as layer mask – This option is available only in the Editor module. In the Manager module, it is grayed out and cannot be used, as the Manager module does not support layers. When selected, a mask is added to the image layer, which can then be further edited using standard mask editing tools.

In the Manager module, the function can be applied to multiple images at once.

Change Color Depth

Use this command to convert a picture between 48-bit color (3 × 16 bits) and classical 24-bit color (3 × 8 bits). You can also use it to convert pictures to 8-bit or 16-bit color.

A 48-bit color depth can express vastly more colors than 24 bits: 2 = 16,777,216 different colors, while 2 = 281,474,976,710,656 colors. Although this difference is not visible to the human eye (the human eye can distinguish "only" about 10 million colors), it does manifest when a picture undergoes digital processing, because many more details are available.

For example, during major brightening of a strongly underexposed photograph, formerly "almost black" areas may flow into a single color. This is caused by the fact that only a narrow portion of the histogram was used in the original picture. If, however, the source picture is stored at a 48-bit color depth, then there is a much higher chance that even this reduced portion of the histogram will be wide enough for the pixels in this area to have differing values, so that finer color transitions remain after brightening.

The disadvantages of 48-bit color depth are larger file sizes, the limited number of programs that support this color depth, and a restricted choice of formats. (Within Zoner Studio, you can only save with 48-bit color depth do the TIFF, PNG, and HDP formats—the JPEG format does not support 48-bit color depth.)

ICC profiles

Assigning an ICC profile

Pictures in the JPEG and TIFF formats can contain an ICC profile. An ICC profile is a description of how to interpret the colors in a picture. Different output devices (like a screen, or a printer) store colors in different ways, typical for the given device. Storing an ICC profile enables all devices that you work with to show your picture in exactly the same way, as long as they support color management and they are correctly calibrated. If a picture has no ICC profile, you can assign one to it, using Assign ICC Profile… By assigning profiles to pictures, you ensure that pictures taken in a color space other than sRGB will be interpreted correctly. After you choose a profile, you can set how the operation will treat pictures that already have an ICC profile. If the Overwrite existing profiles option is checked, then old profiles will be overwritten by new ones. Adding a profile does not transform the colors inside the picture data itself.

This function depends on color management being active in the Color Management section of the program preferences.

Convert to Profile

This function converts picture data to the color space of the selected profile using the method selected under Reproduction. The Perceptual method is offered at first, and is Zoner Studio's recommendation. When you perform this edit in the Editor and then save the picture, the changes are irreversible.

In the Browser, meanwhile, this is like all other edits always irreversible: the change is saved to file immediately!

So here as always: edit copies of your pictures, not the originals.

This function depends on color management being active in the Color Management section of the program preferences.

Convert File Format

Use this function to batch-convert picture files to another format. This function creates a new copy in the original location and in your choice of format.

A typical example is conversion of photos that you have scanned in in TIFF format into JPEG files for use on the Web. If your pictures are stored in JPEG format and you wish to do a large number of edits on them, and it is impractical to make these changes using the Batch Filter or during a single Editor session, then it can be a good idea to convert them to TIFF before the changes. The TIFF format is very useful when you are going to edit pictures, because you can save and re-save pictures to TIFF without any loss of quality, and you can use a higher color depth than in JPEG.

When it is used in the Batch Filter, it is automatically assigned as the last step, ensuring that the changes made are not written to the original file, but only to the newly created one.

Two previews are shown in the left part of the conversion window; they present the original and the file being newly created based on your chosen settings. Controls for the visual comparison of the two photos are above these previews. These include controls for e.g. zooming in/out, showing a histogram and blowout (overexposed spots), or size information for the original and the new file.

The right portion of the conversion window has a “Format” box; use this to set your desired file format. Depending on the format chosen, further settings are shown beneath the menu (color depth, quality, compression, transparency preservation, sampling, etc.)

For the JPEG, HDP, and TIFF formats, the Image information option sets whether all picture information, EXIF information only, EXIF information only minus the EXIF thumbnail (preview), or no picture information will be saved. If you use any setting other than “All” here, the picture and its assigned color profile will automatically be converted to sRGB.

If the picture is open in the Editor, you can save it in any of format that you could convert it to. To do so, use File | Save As… [Ctrl+Shift+S]. In this window, you can both choose a format and give the file a new name and move it to a new path (folder).

Convert to Web JPEG

Use this function to save a picture in JPEG format with an output file size of your choice.

To set your desired output Size in kilobytes, use the slider or enter it numerically. You can also set limits for the compression quality and other JPEG compression settings—sampling, the progressive format, and optimized encoding.

You can also convert the picture to grayscale and choose whether or not to save space by omitting EXIF text information, a preview, and the ICC color profile from the picture.

Batch Filter

Use the Batch Filter to make multiple edits at once to one or more pictures. Use it in the Editor to make them to a single picture, or in the Manager to make them to multiple pictures.

Unlike most of the program's editing filters, the Batch Filter window lets you combine and apply any number of filters, that is, functions for editing pictures and processing picture files. (File-related filters are only available when you've opened the Batch Filter from the Manager.)

Thus you can, for example, use a single visit to the Batch Filter to shrink a picture, sharpen it, brighten it, give it a white border and a black frame around the border, add a copyright watermark, and then rename it. The renaming filter offers the same settings that are available when you use the function named Batch Rename.

The right side of the window shows settings for the individual filters, grouped together into sections. The title bar of each section includes a checkbox. Use that checkbox to include the section or exclude it. The title bars also each include a button for restoring default settings and a button for displaying a menu. This menu contains commands for removing the given filter, re-ordering filters, and adding a new filter. At the right end of each filter's title bar is an arrow. Click it to collapse or expand the whole filter. The top right of the Batch filter window has buttons for adding and removing filters.

Use the Save button at the bottom right to save Presets for the Batch Filter under names of your choice. To quickly run the Batch Filter with a saved preset of your choice, use Edit | Apply Batch Filter.

Two of the filters, Convert File and Renaming, have a few restrictions as a natural result of what they do: each of these filters can be used only once, they can only be used in the order Convert, Rename, and they must be the last filters in order. These filters do not make sense to use from the Editor, so they are ignored if you have called up the Batch Filter from there. There are no restrictions on the output path you can use, and relative paths such as "..backup" are allowed. If the path in question does not exist, it will be created.

You can apply edits to one picture at a time, or apply them all at once to all the pictures in the batch. (The column on the left of the window lists the pictures in the batch.)

For more information on the individual edits offered here, see the topics concerning them.