Olympus Master 2 Imaging Software
Albert W. Starkweather, Philatelic Communicator
In his article on digital references and studies, Francis Adams discusses useful software tools — optical character recognition (OCR) (ReadIris Pro OCR Software) and photo editing. There are great pieces of software available for both Macintosh and Windows computers, one free, that should satisfy the photo editing needs.
Olympus Master 2
Although Francis Adams is a proponent of Adobe Photoshop Elements and I rely solely on Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended, there are alternatives. One of my favorites is Olympus Master 2, which is bundled with Olympus Digital Cameras and is available as a free download (www.olympusamerica.com). The program allows anyone, regardless of the camera or scanner they own, to view, organize, edit, create, share, and print digital images.
Although I normally would turn up my nose at such a program and had discarded earlier versions with previous Olympus cameras I have owned, I rediscovered Master 2 when a friend asked me to research Photoshop alternatives for a photo seminar he was preparing.
Olympus Master 2
Master 2’s editing palette offers resize, crop, insert text, brightness & contrast, color balance, tone curve, gamma, auto tone correction, hue & saturation, monochrome & sepia, sharpness & blur, distortion correction, and red-eye reduction. All of these steps display the original image side-by-side with the unsaved output. This is particularly useful to less experienced users who get visual confirmation of they changes they are making.
The program is well documented and its animated help guide is particularly useful.
This is not a program for those who wish to create complex photo compositions or work on images needing a great deal of correction. However, for the quality of images being produced by today’s digital cameras and scanners (Choosing a Scanner), Master 2 is perfect for producing print and on screen images.
Although Olympus also offers Olympus Studio 2, which offers more extensive image management, for $100, Photoshop Elements 6 at well below $100 is a far better deal. 
