Photography, as we all know, is more than just taking pretty pictures and carrying an oversized camera. There's a huge aspect of photography that we don't often talk about. It's not glamorous. It's not sexy. It's called post production. But there's a better way. It's called BatchPhoto 4, a fast photo editor that will make your pictures look better, without you having to do much.

The latest version of this image editing suite has only been on the market for a few months, and comes with a number of refinements over earlier versions of the same product. It comes in three versions: one for the home, one for the professional, and finally a version that is intended for enterprise customers, which is the one I tested.

A license for BatchPhoto 4 can set you back as much as $149, but is it worth it? Read on to find out.

What Does BatchPhoto Actually Do?

BatchPhoto 4 allows you to edit, tweak and modify your photos in one go on any Windows or OS X based computer. Just select what images you want to tweak, how you want to tweak them, and BatchPhoto will get to work, crunching through your photos using all CPU cores available to it. This takes advantage of parallel processing, and as a result, it's blazingly fast, and is optimized for people using quad and octa-core processors.

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This powerful photo editing suite also allows you to convert your photos into one of 170 possible file formats, in addition to being able to cope with the RAW files produced by high-end digital SLR cameras. In addition, it can bulk-rename your snaps from the cryptic file names created by your camera into something a bit more meaningful.

Sharing your images is also handled with BatchPhoto. You can upload them to Facebook, or to a server with FTP, allowing you to immediately publish your edited photos to the web.

BatchPhoto 4 also supports a number of transforms and modifications that can be made to photos, and can watermark, resize, and stamp photos, in addition to allowing you to change the contrast, gamma levels, and DPI of the pictures you pass to it.

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Not sure how it works? Read on, as I walk you through how you can edit a huge batch of photos in mere moments.

Editing Some Photos

I took some photos of my beloved Blackberry Q10 smartphone from a number of angles, and then copied them over to my laptop running the latest version of the BatchPhoto Enterprise 4 software. I should probably note that photo editing is a reasonably taxing task, and your mileage will vary depending on the specifications of your machine.

The test-bed for the software was my 2012 13" Macbook Pro, running the latest version of OS X Mavericks. This is hardly the most current Apple laptop, but still one that packs a bit of oomph. Especially when you consider that it's loaded with a (slightly excessive) 16GB of RAM. Obviously, if you use BatchPhoto on a weaker system, you might not have the same expedient experience I enjoyed.

batchphoto-wizard

BatchPhoto allows you to edit photos in just a few, short steps. The first of which is importing your photos into the app. This can be accomplished by dragging and dropping your photos into the app through Windows Explorer, or Finder. You can also open a dialogue within the app and traverse through your file system, selecting photos as you go.

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Once imported, you can then decide what you want to do with them. You can select multiple transforms, and arrange the order in which they will be performed. I chose to resize my photos to become smaller, and then added an Instagramesque sepia-toned color filter.

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Any action can be previewed and tweaked before you commit to editing your photos.

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And then it's time to do some editing! You can specify what folder it outputs to, in addition to the file format it is exported to. Then, BatchPhoto will work its magic, producing perfectly edited photos without any fuss.

Conclusion

BatchPhoto isn't a precise tool, like the infinitely challenging Photoshop is. But, it doesn't try to be. Rather, it excels at being a tool for performing actions that are both repeatable and predictable. Actions like resizing images and changing tones and hues, or watermarking photos.

Ever used it? Tempted to give it a spin? Let me know. The comments box is below.