Canon’s Image Browser for Mac Computers and Zoom Browser for Windows PCs is a photo editing software that typically ships with Canons EOS SLR cameras. Zoom Browser which is much more popular, allows you to easily view photos taken with your digital camera, organize them and make slight edits to your images before production. Some functions found in professional 3rd party photo editing software such as adobes photo shop CS4 are supported.
The latest installment of the software is the zoom browser EX version, which supports conversation between unprocessed digital images in RAW format and the popular JPG format. Converted images can be adjusted; for instance if you have photos in JPG you can quickly correct photos of subjects with red eye, allow zoom browser to adjust the photo(s) for you automatically, change the color balance / sharpness /color saturation, trim the photo(s) ready for print, insert text into your photo (s) or select the image to be edited with an external image editor from within zoom browser.
From within Zoom browser EX it is possible to create panoramas from several photos with Photo stitch (which comes included on the zoom browser EX installation disc) and create a photo album on the fly. Being an album organizer, you can also rate photos that you have stored on your computer. This is particularly useful if you intend to prioritize albums according to sentimental value. Zoom Browser EX has a dedicated option that allows you to connect directly to either a canon camera or a canon EOS camera, and take advantage of the full list of features of your digital camera; effectively giving you full control of you camera from your computer.
Zoom browser works by showing you thumbnails of all the photos stored not only on your computer but your camera as well; you can see all your images in the main browser window which loads up as soon as you open the application. This makes it easy to browse through hundred of images simultaneously.
Zoom browser neatly divides general functions into a zoom browser EX task; a task may be to download photos from your digital camera, send an image stored on your computer or camera as an email attachment, plug in a canon EOS camera or print a stored image. All these tasks are grouped into categories in large button panes that are easy to navigate from the main zoom browser window.
Zoom browser allows you to view stored images in 3 modes; these modes are zoom mode, scroll mode and preview mode on Windows PCs and the Macintosh variant of the software has Preview, List and Time tunnel modes. In the PC version, with zoom mode you can view thumb nails of the images contained in folders and subfolder, along with images at the root of your computers drive or camera memory. These images are then placed adjacent to each other in grids and selecting any single or multiple images enables the zoom function which can be increased up to a maximum ratio of 20 to 1.
Scroll mode may be familiar with windows uses as it functions much like windows explorer and allows you to navigate to folders that contain any of your images.
Preview mode is perhaps the most useful of all the 3 modes as it gives the user of the application the most information about a photo image taken by a camera. Double clicking (for windows users) any image displayed in preview mode expands the image and gives you details such as the brightness histogram, file size, date photo was taken, data type, and image resolution. In addition you can get shooting information from the picture such as the camera model used to take the photo, shutter speed, whether flash was used and color space.
Canon’s Zoom browser is handy for the mid-level enthusiast armed with a digital camera, but chances are that professional photographers will stick to more advanced 3rd party applications such as Photoshop.