TheTVDB Art Cut

An abundance of motion pictures air every year, not to mention the daily dose of shows that can keep your eyes glued to the screen for centuries. Specialized websites such as IMDb keep track of every title in history so fans can search for every piece of related info. What TheTVDB Art Cut wants to do is enable you to quickly patch up photos before uploading them to a TV series fan website, namely TheTVDB.

The application comes in an incredibly light package, both in terms of features and technical specifications. There's not even the need to install it on your computer, because it is portable. Your computer's registries remain the same, with little impact on resources used.

Running it brings up a simple interface, with most space representing your canvas. Navigation is easily done thanks to the clever implementation of tabs. These enable you to switch to different crop tools, which generate images for episodes, series, seasons, actors, posters or fan arts.

Most of your effort narrows down to selecting an area of the image to represent the corresponding tool you're using. Details are displayed, coming in very handy with examples and hints to what better fits the type of picture.

You can choose to get a preview. This brings up a new window with your selection being displayed. There's the possibility to save the picture or try to capture a different region. File support is decent, with a few popular formats like JPG and PNG at your disposal, both for import and export.

There aren't any filters or effects to apply, which would have come in handy considering you edit images for your favorite TV show. But the biggest disappointment comes from the lack of an integrated tool with which to directly upload photos, because you depend on a web browser for putting generated images to good use.

All things considered, we come to the conclusion that TheTVDB Art Cut comes with good intentions, with an intuitive design and comprehensive tools, but gets stuck somewhere along the way. Images come out under poor quality settings, and there's no way to have images directly uploaded to the target service, leaving you with the impression of an unfinished product.