PHOTOFL ARE
Enhance your photos quickly and easily
Nick Peers tracks down an image editor that strikes the right balance of features and user-friendliness for making quick-fire edits.
OUR EXPERT
Nick Peers went on holiday recently, giving him some new photos to use in his screengrabs.
Who needs another image editor? You’ve got Shotwell for image cataloguing (and the odd bit of editing) at one end of the scale, and at the other there’s GIMP to rival the likes of Photoshop with its powerful array of tools, filters and plugins. But what about those everyday tasks that you’d like to be able to perform without getting bogged down in GIMP’s multiwindowed (and occasionally confusing) user interface?
One image editor offering to sit in the gap between the two is Photoflare (https://photoflare.io). Based on a popular Windows image editor called Photofiltre, Photoflare combines user-friendliness and simplicity with a relatively powerful set of features that should cover most everyday needs. If it falls short in certain areas then you can, of course, switch back to GIMP, but otherwise you’ll find that Photoflare is able to perform a wide range of image-editing tasks with ease.
NAVIGATING PHOTOFLARE
1 Main toolbar
Provides shortcuts to common options, as well as useful tools like the zoom setting, batch processing tool and colour settings.
2 Filter bar
Focuses on image correction tools from brightness and colour settings to a selection of soften and sharpening.
3 Status toolbar
When performing edits on larger images, keep an eye on this bar. Once it shifts from Working… to Ready, your latest adjustment should be done.
4 Image tabs
Makes it easy to work on more than one image at once by providing separate tabs for each. Click one to switch to it.
5 Tool palette
Use the colour tools to set the foreground and background colours for your drawing tools, and switch between palettes.
6 Drawing tools
Photoflare’s drawing tools cover most bases, from various selection tools to Clone Stamp and Eraser. When selected, a tool may display its own options beneath the tool palette.
Getting Photoflare
The current version of Photoflare is the open-source Community Edition, which we’ll be focusing on in this tutorial. Going forward, the developer is looking to focus more on a paid-for Studio version (see the box over the page for details), which might explain why development has slowed down. However, version 1.6.10 was released recently, and added a couple of minor new features – fine-grained image rotation and the ability to unlock the aspect ratio when resizing an image canvas – so it’s not been abandoned yet by a long shot.
An outdated version of Photoflare is available for Ubuntu and Mint via the main Ubuntu repositories, so be sure to install it from its own repository: