Capture your adventure with Zoner Photo Studio X

Images are how you share your adventures with others and just a few nuances can make or break that feeling you experienced in that fleeting moment. They allow people to visualize your experience and help motivate others to more often explore the world surrounding them. That’s why we at 10Adventures were thrilled when Zoner Photo Studio approached us and offered us a chance to try their photo editing software.

When we initially approached our designer, Vitaly, with the idea of trying Zoner Photo Studio X software for a week, he wasn’t exactly excited about the proposition of changing his routine. He is so comfortable using Photoshop and Lightroom, that the thought of, as with any new tool, spending hours and testing his patience before figuring out a new workflow would be a daunting task, not to mention testing it out. That’s not how it panned out. You can see the results in our free trail guides, which carry thousands of these photographs.

The benefits of Zoner Photo Studio X over Lightroom and Photoshop

“I was surprised how fast I started to get the hang of Zoner Photo Studio X,” 10Adventures designer Vitaly commented. He found a lot of similarities between ZPS X and Lightroom’s interfaces which made it easy for him to find all the functions he needed. He also noted that although the interface is similar, he found Zoner to be more intuitive which, in many cases, saved him time performing his tasks.

Another great feature of Zoner Photo Studio X that he loved was its ‘Editor’ module, which could often replace Photoshop and make photo editing easier thanks to being a part of the same program. Here the Layers function works similarly to Photoshop and is a key feature used by graphic designers to edit photos and create images.

Next, the Develop module as a whole is a great tool, offering a wide variety of presets, many different formats and diverse visual effects that can be added as you please. Besides the previous modules mentioned, there is another, the Create module. Here you can make albums, covers, postcards, calendars, and many more items for printing, and it includes a video editor. This module even lets you order printing services or you can print them right at home!

Powerful Zoner Photo Studio X functions

ZPS X has tons of great features. One that our designer really liked, was the Shift Color function, which allows you to change the hue, saturation, and lightness of specific colours in the photograph. The best part is that you can easily select which colours you want to modify and keep the rest of the photograph unaffected If you only want to enhance the colours of one object in the whole photo, use the Color Correction effect found in the Develop module. It creates a similar effect and may be familiar to you from one of Lightroom’s features.

An important tool for every travel photographer is Polarization. This amazingly simple function allows you to cleverly darken the sky while leaving out other objects in the photo. “A kind of ‘smart contrast’ which I think is really useful,” Vitaly observed. Anyone who has travelled to beautiful destinations knows that the weather is never on its best behaviour. Who has time to wait until the planets align!? You want your photos to look great and the Polarization feature helps to do exactly that.

Another feature we just have to mention is the Maps function. It’s a great tool that can be really useful for travel and adventure photographers, or anyone who geotags their pictures. It generates a map pinpointing where all the photographs were taken so you can easily see where each picture came from. This is a great way to share your hiking trails with others, since you just add your GPS data and it will show the location with the pinpointed photos from your adventure! If you want somewhere to put them to use, browse our guided and self-guided hiking tours.

Switching photo editing software in a single trial week would be a challenge for most creative designers, though Vitaly did not find it so. On his experience, Zoner Photo Studio X is a solid choice for photographers and designers alike who would rather have one reliable tool holding all the important features than jump between programs during a workflow.

More From 10Adventures

• Free trail guides and route notes
• Guided and self-guided tours