Macphun Intensify Pro can help to recover highlight and shadow details
Macphun Intensify Pro at a glance:
- Simple-to-use editing program
- Price: £35
- Website: www.macphun.com/intensify
Bearing more than a passing resemblance to Adobe Lightroom, Macphun Intensify Pro is a simple-to-use editing program for your raw or JPEG images. The software concentrates its resources on contrast and detail adjustments, extracting as much or as little detail from specific areas as you require. For example, you can choose to adjust the micro contrast in the highlight, midtone or shadow areas. Some basic colour adjustments are also on hand to tweak the saturation or colour balance, and you can also create black & white images. Adjustments can be localised by using any combination of the software’s gradient, masking or layer tools.
The final result of the editing depends entirely on your personal taste, with everything available from subtle increases in local contrast and sharpness, to very over-the-top adjustments that create extreme HDR-like images. However, the proprietary algorithms do an excellent job of bringing out hidden details in even the flattest scene.
If you don’t know where to start, there are more than 70 presets that can be applied with a single click – and, of course, you can create your own. Changes are displayed in real time, and the software is extremely responsive.
Overall, Macphun Intensify Pro is straightforward and easy to use. It acts as great standalone software for a quick fix, although advanced users can easily incorporate it into their Lightroom or Photoshop workflow as a plug-in. Edits can then be made to images before they are loaded back into the main software for final editing. A standard version is also available, priced £14, although this lacks a few of the more advanced features and does not work as a plug-in.
SCORE: 4 out of 5
The split screen view makes it easy to compare before and after shots
