Photo Lab

Selteco Photo Lab is a serviceable and affordable piece of photo editing software that can get the job done and suit the needs of less demanding users, but it's lacking in a lot of the bells and whistles that modern professionals come to expect from their photo editing suites. It's hard to exist in an Adobe world. The company has gained such prevalence in the modern world that it's essentially managed to lock down market dominance in a number of different creative fields. Adobe's Photoshop has become so omnipresent that it's begun to be used as a generic verb in and of itself. But over the years, that success and push towards annual iterations has brought its own downsides. The modern Photoshop is expensively priced, tethered to a software as a service model, and overloaded with a bloated number of features. Selteco Photo Lab provides an alternative. It offers all the basic functions you need to manage and edit your photos in one package without having to learn an intricate number of features or having to pay an arm and a leg for the privilege.

But even as Selteco presents itself as a stripped down and simpler alternative to Adobe Photoshop, the industry standards can still be flt in its user interface and experience. Ultimately, that's a good thing. Anyone who's worked in Photoshop or GIMP before should find a comfortable familiarity in this design. Menus along the top of the screen allow you access to all of your tools and system features, but you're likely to spend most of your time with the toolbar along the left of the screen. This presents all of the standard tools as icons so you can more easily identify what you need. Clicking on most of these will open up new,smaller toolbars that allow you to edit that tool's characteristics and properties, but Selteco generally does a good job of making sure these aren't oppressive or overwhelming. It can be easy to get lost behind a wall of windows when you're working with Photoshop, but Photo Lab more or less manages to dodge that particular problem.

While Photo Lab's features aren't as dense as what you'll find in Photoshop, they're still respectable and generally diverse enough to suit the needs of the casual user. Sliders for standard photo adjustments like brightness, saturation, and color are readily available, and there are similarly all the standard options for cropping, rotating, and otherwise manipulating photos. On the more technical end of things, Photo Lab allows you to convert images into a wide number of formats so you can get higher quality images or smaller files that will load quicker. A huge number of filters are also available.