Fotor Photo Editor v3.1.0 Review!

One of the toughest things to find when you are "Living with Lion" is a modern photo editing program.     Photoshop and Elements have now passed Lion by (minimum of Yosemite to use) and most that do still work are either older or just not very robust.  That is why I was extremely happy when I happened upon Fotor in the Mac App Store.  It is easy to use yet powerful and best of all it is FREE!  The only thing you have to do is put up with a small ad in the bottom right of the screen but I find I don't even see it so it is not that big of a deal and definitely not a deal breaker in anyway.

Now I am not a master photo editor, I am a novice and just do some basic things like red eye removing, cropping, color adjusting etc.  I am able to do all this in Fotor plus I am learning some new skills like focus (which is pretty dang cool).  The user interface seems sparse but does have lots of options and isn't overwhelming for this that are not proficient at Photoshop of Gimp.  You can try many different editing tools without worrying about messing anything up because there is a reset button which allows you do remove any editing you might have done.  You can truly experiment with it's features without worry.

Of the different photo editing software available for Lion I do find I enjoy Fotor the best.  It is easy to use but powerful and did I mention it is FREE?  For the more advanced photo professionals out there I would recommend you choose Gimp over Fotor because if gives you all the tools that Photoshop does but works with Lion.  This piece of software is highly recommended by this reviewer and this website!

Audacity v2.1.2 Review!

I am a novice podcaster, nothing serious, just basically for fun.  I am also a novice producer, again just for fun and just for the podcast.  For this I use Audacity.  This is a easy to use for a novice recording programming but has lots of features you can grow into.  And it has a great price ... FREE!  You can beat that with a stick!

This program is available for OS X, Windows and Linux and I have used both the Windows and OS X versions and they both work identically so if you are reading this review on the Mac edition you can rest assured the Windows version works exactly the same.

Ok lets get down to it!  This program records audio from multiple sources and allows you to do some pretty heavy editing if you want along multiple tracks.  For me this includes recording from my Blue Snowball Ice for all my vocals and then layer many tracks to it including an intro, segment transitions and even a music bed if you like.  If you ever used the old MTV Music Generator on the original Playstation then you will know about the layering and how easy it is.   It is pretty user friendly and doesn't take long for you to learn the different functions of the  software.

When editing you can do so much to each tracking, like cropping, volume levels, moving it around to start before or after other tracks etc.  You also have lots of special effects you can do to help make your production sound better.  I have messed around with slowing the speed down a bit to make my speech more clear, adding some base and adding a music bed to smooth it out.  You can even zoom in to make editing easier if you need to remove a lot of "ums" and "ahs" from your speech if you are having issues with that like I do.

You can do so much more with this software than just podcasts but it does work very nice for that and I definitely recommend it to anyone thinking about sticking their toe into podcasting but down't want to spend a ton of money.  Why?  Again because it is free!  Get it today.