Adobe Photoshop Album

• Platform:   Windows 2000 / 98 / NT / Me / XP
• Media: CD-ROM
• Item Quantity: 1

When you don't have to buy film or fuss around getting it developed, you start taking a lot more photos. After a few months with a digital camera you'll end up with so many images you start to have problems enjoying them, and even the largest hard drive gets full in the end. Photoshop Album makes it blissfully simple to keep track of all your photos without worrying about the complex folder structure they might be filed in; it searches your hard drive for photos and files them by the date you snapped them, with a handy timeline along the top of the screen so you can easily jump to the photos you took last Christmas. You can even get a day-by-day view with the calendar which lays out the pictures you took on each day of the month.

Album isn't a powerful image editor like Photoshop or even Photoshop Elements, but the single-click tools help you remove red-eye, adjust brightness and contrast, modify lighting, crop out trouble spots, and fix colour saturation without needing to be an expert, plus there are auto-fixing tools for absolute beginners. The results are good, but you can choose an image editing program to open images in for editing instead. And you don't have to worry about making mistakes because Album always works on a copy of the file.

Organising your photos into categories is as easy as dragging and dropping icons from the tag window at the side onto the pictures. Then you can search your photos by ticking the tags you're interested in; if that doesn't narrow it down enough, you can select just a part of the timeline. This is a simple and intuitive way to work, and you can flip quickly between the photos that match and the ones that don't, or run a more complex search using dates, filenames, captions and whether you've e-mailed, printed or used them in various ways.

You can even find photos with a similar range of colours in, if you're looking for images that work well together. That comes in handy when you want to do something with your photos, which is another area where Photoshop Album shines. If you can think of a way to share your photos, Photoshop Album does it: the Creations Wizard walks you through creating video CDs, calendars, cards, e-cards, e-mail, Web pages and 3-D galleries, many of them based on PDF and all with handy features like automatically resizing photos so they're small enough to e-mail. If you just want to print there's an excellent selection of layouts to fit more snaps onto pricey photo paper. And if you want to burn photos to CD to make space on your hard drive, the thumbnails stay in the catalogue so you can browse or search for them and find out which CD they're on.

There are one or two minor niggles with Photoshop Album, in particular the way you can't change the (American) date format it uses; plus there's no way to apply the same corrections to several images. Despite that, the interface is exceptionally easy to work with and the tools for working with your images are excellent. There are plenty of other products that aim to organise your photos and most image editors have rudimentary tools but Photoshop Album beats most of them hands down. ––Mary Branscombe

Manufacturer's Description
Adobe Photoshop Album, state-of-the-art software for Windows-based computers - for the first time extends the legendary Photoshop brand to the consumer market. With digital camera sales exploding, consumers - freed from the expense and limitations of film - have made digital picture-taking an integral part of every family occasion and event. Photoshop Album solves the biggest problem facing these digital camera owners: how to easily find, fix, share and preserve thousands of photos accumulating on their computers. Photoshop Album leaves the competition behind by using an easy and sophisticated "tagging" system to organize and find images, and leverages Photoshop software's unrivalled image enhancement technology to provide simple, high-quality one-click editing. In addition, Photoshop Album is the only consumer digital photography product to take advantage of the ubiquity of Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), creating an intuitive way to share digital photos with family and friends.Adobe Photoshop Album gathers thousands of digital photos for viewing in one convenient place - the photo well - and automatically organizes them by date. From there, it's simple to find a particular photo: a timeline view displays photos taken over a period of time, while a detailed calendar view shows the exact day and month when each moment was captured. Users can bring precise control over finding and working with specific collections of photographs through Photoshop Album software's powerful tagging system. Visual tags can be created to instantly find photos of favorite people, places, events, or any other subject, no matter how large the collection becomes. Photos don't always turn out exactly as planned, so Photoshop Album provides one-click editing tools to fix common problems, such as red-eye, color, contrast and brightness. For more advanced editing, Photoshop Album provides single-click integration for users of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0, Adobe's award-winning image-editing software for photo hobbyists and amateur photographers. And perhaps most importantly, Photoshop Album is equipped with one-click photo backup to CD and DVD to ensure that memories will be preserved for future generations.Photoshop Album software helps users tell and share the stories of their lives in pictures through entertaining slide shows that can include captions, video clips, and background music. These template-based slide shows are packaged in Adobe PDF, so that Photoshop Album users can deliver their images to anyone who is using free Adobe Acrobat Reader software. With over half a billion copies of this software already distributed across multiple platforms, Photoshop Album eliminates the guesswork of which format should be used to save and share photos - and whether recipients will be able to view them. Adobe Photoshop Album offers prints and other professional photo services through direct links to online service providers, and an easy-to-follow wizard helps users create cards, calendars, albums, Web photo pages, and even 3D Web galleries with just a few clicks of the mouse. Online services may vary worldwide. Adobe has integrated Intel processor optimizations in Photoshop Album, enabling consumers to see improved performance when running the software on Intel processor-based computers.

• Software > Digital Imaging > Photo Editing
• Software > Hobbies & Pastimes > Photo Editing