Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album 4 Review Artistic License Eric Grevstad
While Photo Album doesn't have all the creative power of Jasc's Paint Shop Pro (speaking of which, keep watching WinPlanet for a review of the new version 8 -- Ed.), it borrows some of the image editor's tricks to give families and amateur shutterbugs an impressive array of touch-up and image-improvement options. (Also, as with Photoshop Album and Photoshop Essentials, there's a hot key to open the current Photo Album image in Paint Shop Pro for more serious makeovers.)
As is common nowadays, there's a one-click fixup that automatically adjusts brightness and contrast to boost dim or overexposed shots, but we're more taken with the Adjust Wizard that gives users more precise control of color, brightness, vividness, and focus with very little more work than the one-button function: It walks you through the four abovementioned settings or options, showing each with previews of the current image bracketed by versions that decrease and increase the setting in question.
You have a similar choice of point-and-click or more manual touch-up of red-eye flash effects, along with converting an image to a monochrome or antique-looking sepia palette or decorating it with a mock picture frame -- with choices ranging from museum gilt to old-fashioned photo-album corners or Scotch tape -- or artistic chalk or brushstroke border. A helpful dialog box suggests that you save the modified image under a different name unless you're sure you want to overwrite the original.
Kids and doodlers can experiment with a limited set of special-effects filters, along the lines of fisheye, ripple, and posterization distortions. One funhouse-mirror feature dubbed Thinify lets you stretch a picture vertically to make subjects appear slimmer or stouter -- well, slightly slimmer or stouter if you move the Thinify arrow only one or two notches; otherwise, they look like Stretch Armstrong. (It's not that the camera adds 10 pounds; it's that the camera adds a foot.)
Even something as mundane as cropping an image gets class-act treatment in Paint Shop Photo Album, with the usual freehand select-a-rectangle tool joined by a menu of common print sizes or aspect ratios which, once selected, constrain the movements of a resizable frame.
Overall, we're as impressed with Paint Shop Photo Album as we were with Adobe Photoshop Album a few weeks back. The hard part is choosing between the two: Very generally speaking, the former's chronological organization or searching isn't as handy as Adobe's timeline and calendar views for hardcore digital photographers who want to tag and organize large volumes of images, but we think Paint Shop Photo Album's extra printing and touch-up options make it a better choice for casual users and families who want to use their photos in creative projects. (And that said, we can point to exceptions or features where each could learn from the other -- Jasc's nifty keyword tree, Adobe's calendar and other print templates.)
Most important, either one will swiftly convince you there's no sense trying to use Windows Explorer or an image editor to tame your ever-growing library of digital photos. If the first two things you should buy after getting a digital camera are a bigger flash-memory card and a set of rechargeable batteries, Paint Shop Photo Album is a good thing to buy third.
