13th February 2025

FotoSketcher Photo Manipulation

Fotosketcher Photo Effects
FotoSketcher Photo Manipulation.

I really wasn’t expecting to like this program.  The programs I tend to like are ones where I feel in control, where there aren’t too many “automatic” effects. In fact I stopped using PaintShop Pro for just that reason, I felt it had become a push button a and b type program.

But back to the subject, whilst this is basically a list of  20 or so effects to apply to a photo each one does have enough options to make you feel that you are being creative. In fact choosing the correct effect to use in each instance is an important choice in itself. There are also a number of things you can do to the original image before you apply the effect, crop it or change the contrast, saturation etc..

Now the actual rendering of the finished photo took a fair bit of time in some cases, at least with my set up which I admit isn’t the latest available by a long way but there is a little preview panel which enables you to look at  the effect applied to a small portion of your image and quickly responds to parameter changes. By using this you can be fairly certain what the finished image will look like.

PhotoSketcher 2.09
PhotoSketcher 2.09

As it was waiting fore the render wasn’t an issue for me as I used the time to search out the next image which I know would benefit from one of the effects!

One outcome which I wasn’t expecting from my testing was that often (but not always) a lower resolution image actually produced a better finished result, the applied effect actually looked as I expected it to. With some effects the difference for the higher resolution images was far too subtle.

Watercolour Effect in FotoSketcher
Watercolour Effect in FotoSketcher.

I would highly recommend this FotoSketcher photo manipulation program to anyone who wants to have a “play” with their photo collection. I must admit that the images I ended up making which I liked happened more by chance than by design but I assume after a few weeks practice you would have a good idea of what everything does and what would suit which photos.

Available for Windows Only.

As with all of the software reviewed on this site Fotosketcher is completely free to download and use. When we downloaded it we found no malware, adware or any other issues.  As normal we recommend you ONLY download it via the official website which you will find here: http://www.fotosketcher.com/