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Title: Adobe Photoshop Album
Reviewer: Ernest Lilley
Date: 03/10/03 Rating:
MSRP $49.99 / Amazon Price: $36.99
Product Website / Manufacturer Website  / Specs

Summary: The pre-digital complaint of photographers and photo companies alike is that once you've take your pictures, they languish in a shoebox, never to be seen again. Now in the digital age, it's even worse, scattered over a collection of hard drives, and CDs are thousands of pictures you've taken, but do you have any idea where they are?

Adobe's Album searches out every picture it can reach and puts them all together in  a catalog of pictures. It then acts as an access center for your photos, allowing you to edit, tag, date, print (on your printer or an online service), create web pages, greeting cards or just about anything else you could want.

It does it fast too. Album took one look at my hard disks and found about 30 thousand pictures to catalog...which it did in less than an hour. That only needed to be done once, and then it put up thumbnails (by date) which it was happy to let me scan through nearly as quickly as I could scan them by eye. In the process I found some of "the missing honeymoon pictures" and that was worth the $49.99 alone. Album also let me catalog the CDs of pictures I'd taken off my hard drive to make room or just keep safe. It lets you opt for just making a thumbnail for the catalog or copying the file completely.

You can set up a catalog for work and one for play, but within each catalog, you'll want to use the "tag" feature to group pictures together by event, theme, or whatever you choose. Once you've cataloged all those shots, you can do simple editing, with the autocolor, level, and contrast controls, fix redeye and a few other basic, but needed functions, or you can call for an external editor. Photoshop is the default, naturally, but you can choose whatever you want. If you make changes to your picture, it protects the original by saving the modified picture with "edited" added to the file name.

One feature we got a kick out of was the slide show with background music. Album comes with a collection of instrumental pieces that are timed to synch with slide transitions, and you can quickly put together a slide show that comes off very well, each picture fading (or whichever effect you like) into the next to appropriate music. You'd be surprised how much a little music helps you slides.

This is great software, and if you're taking digital photos, you need it. If you're a pro, it won't solve all your workflow problems, but you might find it worth having around as well.

• Product: Adobe® Photoshop® Album
   

• The fast and easy way to organize and share your lifetime of photos
  Imagine the story of your life in pictures, every digital photo at your .ngertips. Imagine albums of your special moments, arranged in a moment, there to enjoy on your screen, on your printer, even in a custom-printed book. Imagine sharing your stories, one picture or a hundred, effortlessly, instantly, by e-mail, on CD, on the Web. Imagination is no longer necessary — Adobe Photoshop Album is here.
   

• Capture the Moments - Automatic imports from your camera, your scanner, CDs or your computer’s own hard drive, Adobe Photoshop Album software effortlessly assembles all your pictures in the photo well. No more huntingthrough folders or disks, no more searching for photos from last week or last year. Zero in on one shot or view a larger group in your choice of display sizes. Photoshop Album keeps track of all your pictures with no moving of files and no duplication.
   

• Instant Organization - From the moment your photos appear, Adobe Photoshop Album sorts and displays your collection by the date and time you took your pictures, but that’s only the beginning. Quickly and easily create your own keyword tags from the included category list — People, Places, Events and more. After tagging, one click shows your collection of family photos, or your album of holidays, or one that shows only the pictures you took in "Cannes" in the year "2001" with your brother "Chris." Your tags produce crossreferences and your cross-references produce any custom album you can dream of — instantly. With Adobe Photoshop Album, you won’t need an acre of tabletop to sort your photos.
   

• Show and share alike - Sharing your pictures with friends and family has never been easier. Attach photos to e-mail messages with the click of a button — Photoshop Album sizes the attachment to suit the Internet connection. Burn a DVD or VideoCD to show on your TV or computer with any compatible player, complete with sound and video. No extra disk burning software required — Photoshop Album does it all. Creating beautiful prints on your inkjet printer has never been easier — just pick from the included print layouts, or customize them with a few mouse clicks. Create an instant Web gallery for your home page. Take advantage of one-button access to online partners for enlargements, custom-printed photo books, and retail sharing services. No matter what you want to do with your life in pictures, Adobe Photoshop Album makes it easy, and leaves you more time for accepting compliments.
   

• Get creative - Greeting cards, calendars, beautifully designed albums and slideshows — branch out with creations that go beyond simple sets of snapshots. Print them yourself or share them by e-mail in the universal Adobe PDF format, viewable anywhere with free Adobe Acrobat® Reader® software. Use the simple and effective editing tools in Photoshop Album software to .x picture .aws in a .ash, including one-click color, contrast and sharpen corrections, simple slider controls to adjust brightness, or drag and click to crop photos and get rid of red eye. You can even access the advanced capabilities of Adobe’s legendary image-editing products, with smooth integration with Photoshop Elements.
   

• Your complete digital photo solution - • Easy capture from camera, scanner, CDs, hard drives and e-mail. • Access to all your pictures in the photo well. • Fast organization — automatically displayed by the date pictures were taken on compatible digital cameras. • Easy to use keyword tags for cross-reference and one-click sorting. • Search for photos by how you've already shared them. • Single Click Fix and easy editing controls to cure red eye, brighten dark pictures, rotate, resize, crop and more. • Greeting cards, calendars, albums, slideshows, Web galleries and more, all built in a flash from your pictures with the simple, step-by-step creation wizards in Photoshop Album. • Instant access to professional reprints and custom photo books through the Online Services menu. • Smooth integration with Adobe Photoshop Elements, to reach the next level of photo editing and creativity. • Quality you can trust from the name you know best — Adobe.