Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album 4 Complete package

...
INTERCHANGEABILITY WITH OTHER JASC PACKAGES

As I’ve hinted earlier, they’ve yet to make one graphics manipulation package that does everything. Paint Shop Pro comes close, with its ability to straighten parallels, paint out blemishes and telephone wires, red-eye elimination, and the ability to save in a daunting array of file types, some of which can be bulk-converted. If, for example you have a huge collection of larger file ...
.../>
Being another JASC product, it makes sense, just as it does within MS Office, for there to be some kind of interchange between the two packages, ‘Pro’ and ‘Photo Album’. Photo Album has just such a link within its file menu, the idea being that if you wish to stretch beyond Photo Album’s ability to alter a picture, you can bring in the big guns to make your alterations, save the changes and then revert to Photo Album again.

more

A while back, when I took delivery of my new Nikon Coolpix 5700 digital camera, it came with what I have previously termed YATUBGB – Yet Another Totally Unnecessary Bloody Graphics Package.

I am, or rather my PC is, awash with these things. Hardly a magazine disk fails to have yet another one. The problem with these packages is, that they all cover roughly the same ground, but with the annoying habit of having one little tweak extra, which just about makes them justifiable.

What made the copy of JASC’s After Shot, as supplied by Nikon interesting was its ability to ‘stitch’ photos into a panorama – of course they had to have some commonality. For example when ‘panning’ from left to right, the right hand edge of the first photo needed to contain an identical chunk of the left-hand side of the second photo. This is best achieved with a tripod to keep the camera level during this process.

Anyhow, test results from After Shot’s stitch function were excellent, and a superb view of San Sebastian’s beach, made from three ‘can you see the join?’ photos is about to grace my walls, or it will as soon as I get off my arse and frame it – the picture, not my arse!

After Shot is also an album management package, allowing the storage and tracking of photo collections. It also had other useful features such as ‘red eye’ removal.

However, its other photo modification features were outstripped by my copy of JASC’s Paint Shop Pro v7, a package with an impressive array of graphics features, including the ability to straighten up parallels on buildings that appear to be leaning backwards, and to correct the horizons on sloping lakes – no jokes about Irish water-skiing please.

Having loaded After Shot and got comfortable with its features, particularly the panorama stitch, its 60 days ‘grace’ ran out, and I found myself in possession of a somewhat stripped-down version, minus the stitch facility. So I followed the update path to find that After Shot had been superseded by JASC’s Paint Shop Photo Album v4, costing $45US to download. Dial up users note, this is a 38mb download!

Not fancying that prospect, despite having a broadband connection, I got onto www.amazon.co.uk, where the real package, complete with CD-ROM and manuals is available for £25.95 and so I ordered it.

WHAT MAKES THIS PACKAGE WORTH ITS DISK SPACE TO ME?

As I said before, each graphics/photo management package has a particular quirk to justify its existence. Photo Album has a couple of particularly useful ones to my mind.

SLIDE SHOWS - As well as reinstating the stitch facility for me, I find that I can now created a slide show of a specific photo album, not only for use on my PC, which many packages will also do, but that it can be burned to a CD-R for use in any domestic DVD player that can handle the older VCD format, which should be just about all of them. This CD-R can also be subdivided into a multi-media format so that it will also act as a store for the .jpeg files in the album. This allows other PC-based packages like Windows XP’s Explorer itself to run a slide show too. It also gets a mass of large .jpeg files off your hard disk and into archive storage!

The process for making a VCD is simple. Identify the album, and click on the Video CD button. Follow the prompts, which allow you to alter the final output. For example, you can create a title slide, choose a background colour, alter the output from NTSC (North America), to PAL TV, standards (for the UK, Germany and Spain etc). You can also add in background music by specifying the location of a suitable .wav or .mp3 file.

My first attempt was an almost complete success, but for some unknown (as yet) reason, I am unable to hear the music. Not only does the disk boot up straight away in my domestic DVD player, but the archive of jpegs is also on the disk, making my precious photos that bit more secure.

One word of advice I would offer. If you choose the portrait format for many of your shots, then the slide show is not the ideal medium through which to view them, since the 4:3 format of a normal TV screen makes your subject, frequently a person, look somewhat short and fat, however lithe they really are!

INTERCHANGEABILITY WITH OTHER JASC PACKAGES

As I’ve hinted earlier, they’ve yet to make one graphics manipulation package that does everything. Paint Shop Pro comes close, with its ability to straighten parallels, paint out blemishes and telephone wires, red-eye elimination, and the ability to save in a daunting array of file types, some of which can be bulk-converted. If, for example you have a huge collection of larger file formats like GIFF or TIFF, you can identify whole swathes of them and have them converted to JPEG files, with control over how much compression is to be used, and thereby how much file space is to be used.

Being another JASC product, it makes sense, just as it does within MS Office, for there to be some kind of interchange between the two packages, ‘Pro’ and ‘Photo Album’. Photo Album has just such a link within its file menu, the idea being that if you wish to stretch beyond Photo Album’s ability to alter a picture, you can bring in the big guns to make your alterations, save the changes and then revert to Photo Album again.

IN USE

I suppose the acid test is ‘have I had to read the manual yet?’ and the answer is no. This says a lot for the intuitive way in which Photo Album works, or possibly the number of these things I’ve already played with! The package is capable of making use of the full range of exposure detail supplied by modern digital cameras, including date and time of exposure.

There would be little point in going through every feature of any graphics package like this one, since most of the features will be shared across the range, so all I’ve done here is highlight a couple that interest me.

I particularly like the ability to write a DVD-compatible slide show. Many other packages write slide shows, but these tend to be for PC only, and in writing this, I gave my Roxio Easy CD Creator’s Slide Show a go, but this is definitely only a PC job.

The fact that it dovetails into Paint Shop Pro too, is the clincher, as I like JASC products
 

...less