Adobe gets me organized - FOR FREE! (Photoshop Album 2.0)

Member Name: kingseany

Product:	Photoshop Album 2.0
Date:	30/04/05 (1213 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free to try it, Great organization package, Good printing features

Disadvantages: Basic editing functions are too basic, Pay to get the rest

If you own a digital camera or scanner, chances are you'll already have at least one application for dealing with your ever growing collection of snaps. But why limit yourself to one package? I've got half a dozen or so packages installed, for the simple reason that not one package seems to have everything I want. I'm always on the lookout for something new, something to fiddle with, and perhaps actually produce some eye-catching images when I've done enough fiddling. Ultimately though, I want to get my mountain of memories ORGANIZED!

Adobe Photoshop Album 2, is of course one of the many products by Adobe, a most tryed and trusted developer of quality software for the PC and Mac. I'd never hesitate to install Adobe software, in fact I'd certainly put them ahead of Microsoft given the option.

So to the software itself, Adobe tells us that you can "Quickly share your photos with family and friends, fix flaws in seconds, and view all your photos in one convenient place." Simple enough, but's there's more to it than that, I mean every image manipulation package on the planet could probably make the same claim.

Lets break things down a little, to the three mains areas of this application:

* Sharing your photos. We all know we can simply attach our photo to an email and send it off. However with the common place of 7 or 8 megapixel cameras these days, the file sizes can be a bit too chunky for the average mailbox (with the exception of Gmail perhaps). This application will take your pic, make it smaller in size, but not so small that it looks like a 80's video game (very blocky and poor). It works well enough, but I'm not sure it's really any quicker or better than manually doing it, this is assuming you know how to re-size a photo yourself. Not content with just doing this, you can make things a lot more interesting by creating slideshows, which are more like storybooks, all very pretty with captions, transition effects and music. But what if granny doesn't have a PC? Use the software to make her a photo greeting card, or perhaps a calendar. There's plenty of templates you can personalize with a few clicks. If that seems too much like hard work, ask the program to print you out some normal photos onto your best photo paper, but you want 5 copies, 1 large and 4 small - it fits them for you so you get the most out of your media. This in itself is a boon for me, as I print a lot of photos and I'm also a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to photo paper, so this sorts me out. There's plenty of pre-defined settings such as 3.5"x5", 4x6, 5x7, 8x10 etc, and you can also specify your own. The crop to match setting is particularly important, as I usually get frustrated by cropped prints if my image is not the same ratio as the frame size. Contact sheets are also easy to do here.

* Fix Flaws. Hmm, well not so much flaws, I'd say make improvements. Change the brightness, contrast, sharpness using one mouse click, remove red-eye, rotate and crop and apply varoius filters such as sepia. Most packages can do this of course, some better than others. I don't use the red-eye removal in this software, as it seems a bit hit and miss, sometimes failing miserably. The rest of these basic features work pretty much as you'd expect them too, although I feel a little let down by this area on the whole, and will stick with Photoshop Elements for this kind of thing.

* Find Your Photos. Now, perhaps this is the most important and useful feature of the whole package, but a simple one. If you take a lot of images with your camera, you're probably sick of renaming, sorting and organizing them. I know I am. With literally tens of thousands of images, I'm running short of ideas as to what to call files now! I'm also starting to find it hard to find what I'm looking for, and the whole thing is just a mess with images all over the place. This software puts an end to re-naming files. You can simply organize your pics by date, or assign keywords which makes location simple. Even if your images are stored on CD's, it's no problem, this software is intended to sort the lot out. It's easy to just click onto a subject such as "Spot the dog", to see all the pics you've ever taken of Spot! Of course there's a bit of work to do before you can get this far, with assigning keywords to your images, but more more hassle than renaming them at the end of the day. A nice feature is the glance by calendar view, as easy as flicking through your diary.

To try the software out, go to http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads and click onto the Photoshop Album software. Select "Version 2.0.1 Starter Edition - English" (unless you happen to be German, French or Japanese). The download is 6.2mb, so it's not going to take too long to download using a reasonably fast broadband connection, perhaps 2-3 mins. Expect it to take considerably longer if you are still on 56k connections. The full system requirements are :

• Intel® Pentium® II or faster processor
• Microsoft® Windows® Millennium Edition, Windows 2000, or Windows XP
• 128MB of RAM (256MB recommended)
• 50MB of hard-disk space
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0.1 (with Service Pack 2), 5.5, or 6.0 (updated with applicable service packs)
• Color monitor capable of displaying thousands of colors at a resolution of 800x600
• Microsoft DirectX 8.1 or 9.0 software
• QuickTime 6.3 software
• Adobe Reader® 6.0 for viewing Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) slide shows

Installation is pretty straight forward. After downloading the zip file, double click it (you'll need winRAR or a similar unzipping program). Now double click the setup.exe file, and follow the on-screen instructions. Installation takes less than 20 seconds, and you're ready to go!

This starter version has less functions, although is not time limited. The upgrade allows you to :

• Link to Photoshop Elements, merges the features of both programs.
• Fine-tune color saturation. Spice up the color intensity of your photos.
• Convert images to black-and-white or sepia tones. Give your photos an old-time look.
• Fix multiple photos at once. Save time by applying the same adjustments to more than one photo in a single click.
• Create Slideshows with music
• Send photos to mobile phones and PDA's
• Create 3D Web galleries.
• And more. A full comparison can be found here : http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopalbum/start ercompare.html

The upgrade is currently on special at under £30 inc VAT.

The free version is very obviously great value for (no) money. As to whether it's worth shelling out for the rest, well, compare the features and see for yourself. Download it now and have a play!

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