This article was published on August 19, 2014

Batch process common photo tasks with Reformator for Mac


Batch process common photo tasks with Reformator for Mac

Overmacs, makers of the PhotoSweeper photo duplicate eradicator, has launched another extremely useful utility aimed at photographers. Reformator gathers convenient tools that most photo editors wind up needing and using together — browsing, file converting, renaming, resizing, watermarking, color adjustment and metadata tweaking into a single easy-to-use interface.

With Reformator, the key word is “batch” because any operation you can perform on a single image, you can just as easily do on multiple images: indeed, batch processing is Reformator’s raison d’être.

Sure, if you have the Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography bundle, or you own the standalone Lightroom, iPhoto or Aperture, you can do many of the things that Reformator does. The difference is that Reformator specializes in these specific functions, and rather than make you hunt for them among a myriad of pro photo features, it makes them easy to find and use with a combination of pull-down menus and slider tools.

Reformator 1
The browser shows all added photos and lets you view, sort, arrange, and review metadata, among other things.

The app features a number of familiar navigation tools and offers multi-criteria search of photos. The Image Info panel on the right displays detailed information about a selected photo such as the preview, histogram and metadata. You can search photos using the built-in search tool with up to 30 criteria and group photos by capture date, image format and more.

Converting photos has become a popular activity as high resolution images or those shot in Raw format are now routinely repurposed for use in Facebook, business cards and photo books. Instead of a standalone conversion utility, Reformator covers all formats supported in OS X and can convert to formats such as BMP, GIF, JPEG, JPEG 2000, PDF, PNG and TIFF.

Reformator 3
Search with multiple criteria.

Pro users will be pleased with the app’s support of color spaces such as RGB, grayscale and even CMYK. Color depth capabilities range from 8 to 32 bits with or without alpha channels.

With classic image editors, there’s a vast range of adjustments you can make to photos, and Reformater lets you adjust with auto contrast, auto white balance, gamma, contrast, exposure, sharpness, grayscale, sepia, colorize, temperature, as well as various channels and curves. You can also work with transparency and color matching.

Reformator 2
There are plenty of actions to choose from.

This app also lets you rename your photos with meaningful names in a similar style as tools available in pro apps like Photoshop, using a combination of text and tags. You can also rename photos while copying to a folder even without conversion.

There may be standalone utilities that let you resize photos, but with Reformator, you can also use built-in actions such as scale, crop, add border, trim, trim color, rotate & flip, auto rotate (by EXIF orientation) and change resolution.

Reformator 3
Image format converter lets you choose from a variety of formats and additional settings.

The app’s watermarking utility is hugely customizable, letting you use photo metadata information such as tags, capture date, keywords and camera brand as well as text you enter. Font size can be either fixed or relative to an image width, height, long or short edge. You can also customize multiline text, stroke, shadow, rotation, tiling and other features.

With photos going out to a global audience of viewers, metadata can be key to both sharing relevant information and keeping important personal data private.

Refotmster 5
Batch changing file names.

Reformator lets you set and update capture dates of your photos with actions such as set or shift capture date, and remove private tags such as GPS, camera owner and keywords. You can alternately set your own copyright, add keywords and more.

Reformator is available for $7.99 on the Mac App store and works with OS X 10.9 or later.

Reformator

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