Jasc’s Paint Shop Photo Album 5 is a simple and easy-to-use digital camera software program, making it suitable for the digital home. Installation of the package, which runs Microsoft Windows XP, was a less than a five minute job.
The software has a newly-designed user interface that incorporates
four tabs to help users achieve what they want with their photos quickly and straightforwardly. The tabs — organize, enhance, create and share — follow a sequential workflow from downloading pictures to printing.
Pop-up help
Each time the user opens the software, a pop-up help window appears offering tips on various functions, including how to get photos from a camera to the PC (if users are on Windows XP and their camera uses the WIA connection system, the photos will automatically download). This window can be easily closed if users want to start using the program on their own – which is what I did.
The software came with some sample pictures, but I chose to download some of my own from a CD. Using the “”organize”” tab, I saved my photos onto the hard drive in under a minute.
Under the “”enhance”” tab I could chose from a list of options including crop, quick fix (automatic image enhancement), adjust (flash/backlighting, brightness/contrast, colour balance, saturation and sharpness), and red eye (always important for us non-professionals).
The adjust option (which also includes an adjust wizard) splits the picture into two, with the photo in its original state on the left and new on the right. Other enhance features include add text, convert image to black and white or antique sepia and add edges or frames.
Getting creative
The “”create”” tab includes album pages, greeting card, book (which can be ordered online from MyPublisher.com), e-card, calendar and CD label. For the latter, I purchased Grand and Toy’s CD/DVD labels for inkjet and laser printers. In seven steps, the wizard guided me from placing an image and text to saving to printing.
Since there wasn’t an option under the print window to switch the type of page to CD/DVD label, I had to take two tries to get the image and text in the right place.
In “”share”” mode, options include e-mail, print, quick show, video CD, Web gallery, Quick CD (which burns photos onto CD in two clicks), order prints (off of Shutterfly’s Web site), screen saver or wallpaper.
