JASC PhotoAlbum 5 by Mark Shapiro

Are your digital pictures perfect the moment you hit the shutter button? Or, are you like the rest of us who spend more time importing the digital images into a computer and fine-tuning and tweaking them to make the shots look just right? And once you got the pictures looking pretty, then organizing them into slide shows and sharing them with your friends and family via email, web sites and CDs?

 As you probably know, there are a lot of options for photo editing software. You can get a sophisticated image-editing program like Adobe PhotoShop that enables you to do everything you can think of and a lot more to your digital images but comes with a steep learning curve and an expensive price, to the many of the “free” programs that come bundled with most digital cameras.

 The leading companies even offer a choice of programs to choose from – one with lots of choices and power, and then one or two simpler ones, that almost anyone can use with having to read the instruction manual. For instance, in addition to Photoshop, Adobe also offers Photoshop Album and Elements, Ulead has the top of the line PhotoImpact as well as the simpler and less powerful Photo Explorer and Photo Express.

 In this review we look at Jasc’s new PhotoAlbum 5, the new little brother to the venerable Paint Shop Pro program. PhotoAlbum is for computers running the Windows operating system. If you have a Mac, you could always run PhotoShop, Apple iPhoto2 or the new Mac version of Ulead’s PhotoExplorer.

 Photo Album 5 is built upon the rock solid Photo Album 4 and adds some exciting new features like an improved user interface, new ways to view and find your images, more special effects and filters, improve output selections and a new image archiving feature called PhotoSafe.

  I have used Jasc photo imaging products for many years – primarily because they are rock steady and easy to figure out. I have never read a Jasc product manual, and with the advent of Photo Album 5, that trend continues.

 It may not have the power of the full Jasc Paint Shop Pro program but Photo Album is less expensive, easier to use, and will do almost everything most digital photographers need done. It can import and view photos from digital cameras, organize and label them which means you can find them quickly among the thousands of image files you may have scattered across your hard drive. You can share and distribute your photos to friends and family, and most importantly, it enables you to edit, fix and clean up your images, as well as to add a few cool effects like borders and frames.

 Let’s start with basics – the GUI or graphic user interface. This is the opening screen where you will end up doing most of your work.

 I opted to go straight to the program and the Organize page. In addition to the typical windows menu programs along the top of the page, there are four big tab that help navigate you through the program – Organize, Enhance, Create and Share.

 The Organize tab enables you to import your images from your camera, scanner, hard drive or removable media, select the images to work on as well as to organize your image files as appropriate. If you pick a directory to search, you can use the QuickShow commend to automatically create a self-running slide show of your images within that directory. You can search and organize for photos by date, by folders or by keywords. The organize tab also enables you to do batch processing of a bunch of shots at one time. You can also use Organize to easily create a slide show of selected images or an entire directory. This is one of my favorite features when I have visitors. I can se the program to slide show and leave the room, and let it run. You can choose how long you want each image to appear as well as what transitions to use between images. Very cool.

 The Enhance tab is where you’ll probably end up spending most of your time. As mentioned earlier, this is a basic program designed to provide just the essential image correction and editing functions. You can crop your picture to remove parts you don’t want. The crop feature is very easy to use and provides a pixel size count of your finished image that can be very helpful when trying to create images of a certain size.

The Adjust control in Enhance provides a variety of ways to improve your picture. It uses a split screen approach so you can see the before and after. You can adjust sharpness, contrast, brightness, saturation and color balance. The backlighting/flash is very interesting and lets you adjust the exposure of the foreground or background of a shot – without having to separate it into layers. This is very useful for shots that didn’t get correctly exposed.

 Enhance also allows you to add an edge or frame to your shot, insert text and titles, control redeye as well as convert your images to black & white or sepia. If your subjects are a bit too rotund, you can use the “thinify” command to skinny them up a bit. Who needs a diet when you got “thinify”? Thinify does work both ways – it can make your subjects look wider as well as skinner. It is your adjustment. Finally, there is a quick fix command that seems to work amazingly well. I tried it on a several shots and was amazed.  It worked better than manually enhancing and was a heck of a lot faster to boot.

 I found it a bit difficult to re-position text exactly where I wanted it. Once text is placed over an image, you couldn’t remove or adjust it without starting over.

 Create and Share 

 The Create Tab lets you pick various types of projects and then walks you through creating it. You have a choice of creating a photo book, calendar, album page, greeting card, e-card or a CD-ROM label.  I was a bit disappointed to see how few pre-created templates were included in the program. However, if you need more, and you probably will, you can buy and download additional template packs from the Jasc web site.

 The Share tab is pretty obvious – this where you can save your final image in a variety of different file formats. You can also use share to send the image via email, burn it (or a bunch of shots) to a CD, and use your images to create a web page or a screen savor or wallpaper for your computer. You can also create and burn slideshows to a video CD that can later be played back using almost nay DVD player.

 When you create a slide show, you also can create DVD menus as well as soundtracks for the menus as well as soundtracks of the slideshows themselves. You can also add special text pages for display between the images in the slide show.