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Get a Top Rated $60 Photo Editor for Whatever You Want to Pay [Expired]
Note: This Offer Has Now Expired
The freeware version of Sagelight Image Editor is currently our Top Pick for the "Best Free Digital Editor." During the month of April, in an exclusive offer through Gizmo's Freeware, you can get the $60 full-featured version of this amazingly powerful professional image editor and pay just what you want!
Sagelight Image Editor
Sagelight Image Editor V3.0 (previously called LightboxPlus) is a professional 48-bit image editor, with many powerful features that can take a humdrum snapshot, and turn it into something truly exceptional. If you can use a computer mouse then you can use this program. It is designed around a very simple and user friendly concept of click and drag sliders, that are completely intuitive, and you can see the results of the adjustments in real-time. You will be able to begin using it immediately to enhance your pictures, even if you have very limited knowledge of digital photo editing software. If you find yourself saying, "Since it is easy for beginners to use, it can't be powerful enough for a professional," then you would be very mistaken. The keyword here is "depth" This program has real depth. As you become more familiar with the program, you will find that every aspect of your images can be tuned. By combining different functions with each other, you can bring out details and colors you had no idea were even there.
Part of the power of this program is that it supports 48bit color depth. That is over over 281 trillion possible colors. The human eye can perceive little beyond 24bit, which might leave some asking, "So what the point of the other 24?" The answer is that all that extra information helps with color accuracy, so Sagelight can take those imperceptible colors and bring them into 
the visible realm revealing a stunning amount of hidden detail and vibrance. If you have a camera capable of shooting RAW, you can work directly on your images in Sagelight before converting them so no image information is lost. Not really into RAW, or don't even know what it is? No worries! Even if you have a low-end digital camera, that delivers just so-so quality pictures, with a little practice and patience you should be able to make them look like they were taken with pro equipment. Since seeing is believing, take a look at some of these impressive video demonstrations.
Sagelight 48-bit Image Editor v3.0 features include:
- Very fast, real-time native 48-bit editor
- .8bf filter support (Adobe Photoshop compatible filters)
- Most functions written with SSE/MMX technology
- Easy and Intuitive controls, designed just for Sagelight
- Powerful 'Quick Edit Mode'
- Professional level functions
- Dodge and Burn, and Clone Brush
- Unlimited Undo History with an "Undo Brush" to merge or blend different image states
- "Smart Light" features to help add light or create contrast without destroying image information
- Tooltips on every control and extensive help
- Very powerful masking functions
- Tutorials for major functions
- Extensive Auto Color/Auto Level algorithms to help balance your image
- Straighten Horizon (arbitrary rotate) with Auto Crop
- Resize, Crop, Add Border, Red Eye removal, Print, etc.
- Unsharp Mask, Gaussian Blur, Median, and Skin Smoothing and noise removal functions
- More than 70 different functions and effects
- 48-bit RAW File Support with Highlight Recovery
- 48-bit, compressed tiff (read and write) support
- And much more......
Promotion Details:
The version of Sagelight you will receive through this exclusive offer is a special Gizmo's branded version, of the current $60 commercial version.
Gizmo's Exclusive Edition of Sagelight Image Editor includes:
- Full featured, 48-bit level editor with 70+ unique functions.
- All Version 3 updates for free (the current version is 3.1)
- 25% discount on the next major version upgrade when it is released (in about 5 months)
- Access to over 20 video tutorials
- Blog/Newsletter and Discussion Groups
- Technical Support
How to get Sagelight:
- Go to the developers website, and follow the instructions there to make a payment through Paypal. The amount you choose to pay is entirely up to you but because of Paypal's fees, it is suggested that you make a payment of $2.00 or more otherwise the developer will be out of pocket which would be unfair. (Note: If you are outside of the USA read this post here and the followup if you are having trouble paying with a credit card through Paypal)
- After payment you will receive an email with instructions on how to download and install Sagelight
- If you don't get an email within 30 minutes please check your spam mail folder as the email may be there. If you still have problems email Sagelight support at rob@sagelighteditor.com.
System Requirements:
- Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows 7
- At least 512 Megabytes of Ram,
- Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon64 or Opteron or newer processors (c. 2003 or later)
- 15MB free for download, 20MB free for Install.
http://www.sagelighteditor.com/gizmo.html
Notice to webmasters. You are free to link to this article but please do not copy it it to your website or use the download links on your site.
Disclaimer: Gizmo's Freeware does not receive any financial benefit from this offer.
- Article type:
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Comments
This is great! very nice idea, thanks for sharing, glad i found this site, keep it up!
Important Notice About the Sale -- 24 hour outage on the website (until about mid-day, May 1st, PST (GMT-0800)):
Hi, everyone. My dedicated server company, Cadero, decided to take my server down and it is currently on a truck, being transported from San Diego to Phoenix.
The site may be down for up to 24 hours. I have cancelled my business with Cadero, and will find another server company.
I will extend the sale through the weekend to make up for it.
Sorry about the problem there. I can't believe they didn't mirror it. ugh. I'm having e-mail withdrawls, too. :)
Please e-mail me at sagelighteditor@yahoo.com while the site it is down with any questions.
Also, I'd like to thank everyone for the nice comments, and also for paying what they can during the sale.
Rob
I just want to reiterate a little better my positive experience with this software. I use Gimp (and still do) and I was more than a little skeptical about this at first. The one discovery that really got me going was that I found the small tab a little bit hidden behind the quickedit tab. These effects are very powerful. And after reading (watching) the very explanatory tutorials, the UNDO brush is another feature that is outstanding. What I think makes this so very nice to use is the real-time viewing of changes. When I try to use the Vintage effects in Gimp, I have to restart once I've incorporated changes and find that they're not quite to my liking. With SageLight, this is so fast -- with the sliders I"m seeing these changes and can adjust settings immediately. Hope I don't sound too much like an ad, but this is a very nice program. Worth every penny I should have spent.
Downloaded the trial. Installed on 4-17.
Just tried to open the program again to look at it some more (4-19)--it says the 30-day trial has expired (in 2 days!). Said uninstall and reinstall. Did that--still says trial is expired.
Any fixes?
Hi. This has periodically been happening. I am not sure what is causing it. I will definitely look into it and try to determine the cause. I recently had to adjust the code for some UAC issues with Windows 7, and this appears to be what is behind it.
I'm thinking that it is caused when you install it as Administrator, but then run it as another user -- that is the issue with Winodws 7 I had to address, but it caused a bug.
There is a workaround, and I will have an update for that in a week.
--- For anyone that has had an early termination of the trial, please let me know and I will make sure I extend the Pay What You Want Sale for you.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Rob
I'm another with the same problem. Running XP on my computer, I installed the program - as I do with all new progs - while logged into my Admin account. Entered registration code, all worked fine.
Then I logged on as User - as I always do for day-to-day work (it's good safe practice!). When Sagelight opened, Error popup said "Trial expired, please reinstall". Instead I clicked OK, then re-entered my registration code. Program worked. But then when I closed and re-opened (still logged in as User) same error/reinstall popup appeared.
It is a real pain if I have to re-enter the code each time I open the program as User. But I'd really rather not have to log in as Administrator every time I want to use Sagelight, when I work in my User account for everything else.
Any ideas, or progress, towards a fix?
This is definitely a bug, and should be directed to the developer. Please contact him and let him know about this at the email provided above. He usually fixes things pretty quickly.
Have contacted Rob - who responded amazingly quickly. He's aware of the problem, is working on it, and says an update with a fix is due out in a few weeks. Apparently the bug has arisen (at least for those of us using Windows XP) because of other changes made to the program to cope with the way Windows 7 UAC operates.
br1anstorm
Had same issue. Fix coming. It has something to do with not installing it on your Admin login
Cliff
Did you change the date on your computer at any time? People used to use such a technique to get around trial-ware time limits, so changing your date often upsets the trial clock.
If this is not what happened in your case, it could be a bug, but I am unsure what you can do about it.
Once I saw that I could download a 30-day trial before I decided what to pay, I decided to download Sagelight. I had already installed the free Lightbox to see what the program would be like and I have one question:
Is there any way in Sagelight to straighten a picture. I tend to have slightly crooked horizons--a lot!--and the first thing I do is straighten my photos. I could only find a rotate 90 degrees function in Lightbox.
Thanks.
Try one of these 1. File Menu > Image > Rotate / Straighten Horizon. (Choose, the "Any angle option")
or 2. On the tool bar 3rd from the top on the left hand side. (Icon is a white circular like arrow)
You can use the sliders or trace a horizontal line.
I am impressed.
Shame about the lack of png support at the moment.
Thanks, Rob, for the quick reply re: AMD cpu. It's too bad I can't try out Sagelight, it sounds excellent (and your website looks really informative too.)
This was the first time I've come across this issue, an actual hardware limitation of my older PC. I found another example today, the Pale Moon browser (a Firefox build compiled specifically for Windows); although that developer also has a limited, less optimized version for AMD-XP's.
Thanks for the info and the very nice offer!
I installed and tried it out. I'm a complete idiot with this kind of software and to me the program seemed glitchy but now I'm thinking it's me who is the glitch. On the assumption that I just need some more time to work with it, I made a donation and am awaiting the registry key. I appreciate the opportunity to purchase this way. Now I can take all the time I need to figure it out and will be ready to purchase the upgrade (an additional perk to this offer) when it comes out.
Mostly I just wanted to say Thanks!
The good:
- Easy to use.
- Nice filters.
- Internal 48 bit format.
The bad:
- No layers
- No brushes
- Limited image format support, no PNG, no PSD, no XCF
The bottom line:
Good to have if you want a quick filter on a photo, but not if you want to do something more complicated.
Hi.
I would respectfully disagree about part of your overview. Sagelight has many brushes. It has the Cloning Brush, Undo Brush (i.e. History Brush), Dodge and Burn Brush, Masking Brushes, etc.
The Undo Brush acts as a quasi-layer system. Sagelight was consciously written to do the things that people typically want do with layers -- but without layers. That's one of the main points behind Sagelight, because layers can get very complicated and unfriendly.
I think what I am starting to see is that because the Quick Edit Mode is so purposely simple, that the higher-end items get missed sometimes -- the Smart Light, the aforementioned brushes, the Photo Filter / Gradient, Duotoning, extensive masking, etc. -- I've noticed that sometimes people just see the first front end and see it as a simple editor, which, in a way, is a compliment.
It's really meant to be both simple and powerful, but sometimes the extended functionality does get missed.
But, in the words of Dominique Gregoire, who I have featured on the website: "I showed the "undo brush" and "advanced masking" features to a friend who's starting to use Sagelight. He said : "Wow, I didn't know it was possible""
But, no, Sagelight doesn't currently support PSD, XCF, or PNG.
See you later,
Rob
Hi Rob,
I was hoping you could clarify on any differences there might be between the discounted release and the full-price release...
Thanks,
Chris
Hi, Chris.
The main difference is that I'm not really able to include the next major version (4.0) for free with the Pay What You Want Sale. For this sale, there is a 25% discount on version 4 when it is released. With the full version purchase, version 4 will come for free, with probably a $20 upgrade price to the next major version after that).
That's just about the only difference. Updating will be handled slightly differently, but will still be the full version -- all updates until version 4 will be the same as the regular version, except that they have the Gizmo logo/button on it.
See you later,
Rob
Hi, everyone.
I want to thank everyone for the really nice comments about Sagelight and the great feedback. It really makes working on Sagelight worth it, and makes me glad I did the Pay What You Want sale to be able to make Sagelight cheaper, if only for a month.
Registration E-mails
I wanted to address the registration problems that have been mentioned. In most cases, a registration e-mail is sent within a couple minutes of your paypal purchase/donation. Paypal e-mails me, and my e-mail server sends out a registration e-mail.
In a few cases, it hasn't worked out as planned. In most cases, the e-mail arrived but was later found in the spam, junk, or trash folder of the recipient. In other cases, it's hard to know what happened, though my logs show that the e-mail server has been dutifully sending out e-mails -- and it sends me a cc: on another account, so I know it is working.
But, that's ok. The main thing is that it can take a day or so to figure out what's going on. People have been very patient, and the few occurrences have either had a logical explanation, or were recitified when I personally send out another registration e-mail.
So, if you purchase Sagelight, please check the spam/junk folder, but also please feel free to contact me personally after a reasonable time (like a day). The 30-day trial is in effect, so Sagelight will stil work in the meantime.
Anyway, thanks again for all the support.
Rob
rob@sagelighteditor.com
P.S. if you're interested in some varied examples of Sagelight, check out http://duotones.sagelighteditor.com or http://sagelighteditor.wordpress.com
Hi, I just noticed the system requirements. Does anybody know if an Athlon XP2000+ cpu would work? It's ~2002, I think just below the Athlon64.
Hi. If you download the trial, it will tell you right away if your system supports SSE2, so you could try that without having to pay at all.
I probably should have mentioned more than the download is a 30-day trial, so you can try it first.
I just looked p the XP2000+, and the specs I found say it doesn't support SSE2. I am slowly working on a version that supports SSE-only, but I don't currently have an SSE-only computer to test on. Hopefully I'll get one soon and be able to make a workaround. This affects just a few users with older models (mostly AMDs), but once I get the right testing environment, then I can work on getting a workaround for that.
Rob
rob@sagelighteditor.com
I'm a Photoshop user since way back when. I'm 50% proficient in maybe 20% of what PS provides -- it's one formidable program.
This is my first encounter with Sagelight, thanks to Dave and developer Rob.
I've dl'd the app as well as a half dozen video tutorials -- the fact that Rob and colleagues have actually gone to so much trouble to create these, as well as prepare a superb product site, bodes well for the future.
Like most everyone nowadays, I've known easier times, financially. But that doesn't mean under-valuing talent. Or opportunity. Because to do either, or both, leads inevitably to a world where talent withers and opportunity disappears.
I'll happily pay the minimum $20 fee suggested by Greg in his wonderful post elsewhere in this column.
For now though, my sincere thanks to the developer (and a word to ignore any of the dafter comments that may land on here: free speech oft times gets an even greater devaluing than freeware and shareware) and to this irreplaceable site.
I'll report back on my own personal experience in due course.
All best, guys, and thank you again.
MikeR
Lake District
England
Thanks Mike for the encouraging words. We are glad to have been a help.
Ritho
My experience mirrors poster #1 After making my payment through PayPal I waited for one day before emailing the author yesterday inquiring about the registration key. I'm still waiting for some form of response.
For me it's not a big deal as I was mostly interested in supporting this marketing method. Alas my recent excellent experience with the good folks at winpatrol was not repeated. Mores the pity.
Please email me privately by clicking my user name above. I will help you resolve this problem. Note: you must create an account to contact me this way.
Ritho
I'm one who has not received my reg number or a response to my email to the author. And there is no response in my junk mail folder. PayPal has given me a confirmation number so it appears there is nothing more I can do except lodge a complaint with PayPal and I'm not inclined to go do that for five bucks. I just posted my experience so others might know.
Ron
I am sorry you have had a problem getting the registration email. You are still posting anonymously. As I said, if you contact me privately and give me an email address then I will be able to help you out. Please don't automatically assume that someone is trying to rip you off. Things do happen. Obviously from the posts below many people have purchased it and had no problems. In fact literally hundreds of people have purchased without problems.
If you want help to resolve this then I will help. Contact me.
Ritho
Editor
My only problem is that after donating, I never heard a word back - no reg key, no email, no "thanks", no nothin'. (sigh)
Oh, well - one more company for the "never buy from these guys" list...
Wait! Don't Give Up So Easy!!
There have been a number of cases where the registration email got caught in the spam filter. Check your spam filter. Literally hundreds of people have been purchasing the software, and it is easy to overlook one that did not complete properly. As the article above says. If you don't get your registration email in a half hour or so contact Rob as the email address listed above.
No need to be pessimistic. You can be absolutely sure that we will get you a serial number. Just hang in there.
Also you can send me a private email by clicking my user name above, but you will have to have create an account to be able to access the contact form.
Ritho
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