Ashampoo Photo Optimizer 6 adds new portrait tools, photo effects, delivers UI improvements

German developer Ashampoo has unveiled Photo Optimizer 6, the first major new build of its fast, user-friendly photo tool for over two years.

The program adds a number of new portrait-enhancing tools and a slew of extra effects, but also delivers various "structure" improvements to the user interface and promises a more efficient, faster image-editing tool. It also drops support for Windows XP.

The program opens with an improved one-click optimization tool, which can be applied to multiple photos. User-interface improvements are designed to make images easier to handle, with a particular focus on the crop, free rotate, watermarking, age image and horizontal straightening tools.

Photo Optimizer 6 also adds three new portrait-enhancing tools to accompany the existing red-eye removal feature, namely Whiten Teeth, Clone Areas and Remove Spots.

It also ships with a large number of new creative effects, including image overlay, emboss, shade, blue shift, segmentation, solarize, posterize, sketch and various distort and noise effects.

Other changes include an improved batch-processing tool, new integrated webspace uploader for sharing photos via Ashampoo. The program is also less resource-hungry, and has been fine-tuned to deliver better performance over the previous version.

Ashampoo Photo Optimizer 6 is available now as a free trial download for PCs running Windows Vista or later. The .NET Framework 4.0 tool is also required. The full version can be purchased for $14.99, while existing users can upgrade for just $5.99.