If you're trying to make up your mind about registering Photo Mechanic...

[MikeA]

... here's one reason among many to give it serious consideration.

I looked around for a long time for fast and efficient 'save for web' routines. I always hated Photoshop's. I tried several standalone applications. All that came close to being useful nevertheless had some serious flaws. I even tried rolling my own command-line-driven tool, a Perl script that calls both ExifTool and ImageMagick (<sigh>: mixed results at best). The GUI app I finally settled on has a UI that takes getting used to. It was working ok but recently I found some of its conversions to sRGB producing a noticeable loss of color saturation. <SIGH> again...and back to the drawing-board.

I'd been ignoring Photo Mechanic's "Save photos as..." feature for a long time -- until recently. Holy smokes, why hadn't I tried it before? It's just what I'd been looking for in a save-for-web application! Consistent with the rest of PM's features, this one has a very clean, straightforward UI. It enables you to select the quality setting for JPEGs; to assign the saved images to sRGB; to select 72 PPI output; to resize to user-selectable maximum pixel dimension for the long side of the image (retaining the original aspect ratio); to rename while saving, with PM's usual tons of choices via the variable feature; at your option, to retain EXIF and IPTC data in the output files. There are watermarking and sharpening options (the sharpening needs some improvement, IMO). As with other such applications, it enables you to save a 'recipe' for quick setup the next time you do a save-for-web operation. And, it does its saves gratifyingly fast -- no small feat on this older/slower machine I'm using. So far: no noticeable loss of color information during the saves.

Considering how many images I have to save for the web at times: I'd consider PM worth the asking-price for this feature alone!

[FVlcek]

Just to add, Photomechanic's resizing when saving a photo is excellent. I do not know what algorithm do they use for resizing, but I find the result better and more pleasant then Photoshop's. Either when downsizing a photo for web or email (sharp, detailed but not oversharpened) or even when upsizing - I have been preparing files for 40x50cm prints from Canon 1DII and 1DIII and I used PM to resize the toned originals up to the print size, with very good results.

[MikeA]

Yes, it does a good job of resizing -- but I'd used it only to reduce image sizes. How interesting to hear that it's also good at enlarging them.

(A note to the Camera Bits people: Photo Mechanic's combination of "save for web" features is excellent. If ever you wanted to make a standalone save-for-web application that could be run either via a graphical user interface or -- once various parameters had been saved to some kind of config file -- via the command line, I'll bet it'd sell pretty well once the word got out. I would surely love to have such a tool that could be launched via the command line. The addition of user-adjustable sharpening and a 'file size not to exceed...' controls would be cool, too.)

Just to add, Photomechanic's resizing when saving a photo is excellent. I do not know what algorithm do they use for resizing, but I find the result better and more pleasant then Photoshop's. Either when downsizing a photo for web or email (sharp, detailed but not oversharpened) or even when upsizing - I have been preparing files for 40x50cm prints from Canon 1DII and 1DIII and I used PM to resize the toned originals up to the print size, with very good results.