The Bottom Line
Corel Paint Shop Photo Album 5 (formerly from Jasc Software) allows you to import, organize, enhance, and share your digital photos. The printing and sharing features are exceptional, but there are better solutions for editing and organizing your photo collection.
Pros
- Many ways to share and print your photos with lots of stylish templates.
- Detailed printed User's Guide and product tour; step-by-step projects.
- Integrates well with Jasc Paint Shop Pro.
Cons
- Most dialog boxes and preview windows are too small and can't be resized.
- Inefficient organizing system which is difficult to manage.
- Some features don't work well (red-eye removal) or aren't very useful (batch 4x6 crop, thinify).
Description
- Browse, organize, enhance, and share digital photos from disk, camera, or scanner.
- Display digital camera EXIF information; add keywords, captions, notes, and audio to each picture.
- Search images by date range, image information, album information, name, size, or keyword.
- Fix common problems with one-click quick fix, guided adjustment wizard, or manual controls.
- Tools for adjusting color, lighting, tone, and sharpness. Also crop, fix red-eye, add text, rotate.
- Effects: borders, frames, edges, sepia, black & white, thinify, & more. Draw freehand with pen tool.
- Share images via email, customizable Web galleries, video CD slide shows, or photo sharing sites.
- Create prints from a variety of custom layout templates. Auto-stitching tool for instant panoramas.
- Batch processing for quick fix, rename, resize, convert, sepia, black & white, and 4x6 cropping.
- Requires Pentium II or higher running Windows 98se/2000/Me/XP; 128 MB RAM, 45 MB disk space.
Guide Review - Corel Paint Shop Photo Album 5 Deluxe Edition (formerly from Jasc Software)
Corel Paint Shop Photo Album 5 (formerly from Jasc Software) allows you to import, organize, enhance, and share your digital photos. It offers four ways to browse your photo collection--folders, calendar, keywords, or advanced search. Organizing photos is done by arranging them in folders and by assigning keywords, notes, and descriptions. Album 5 offers both automatic and manual tools for fixing common problems such as color, tone, and red-eye. The organizing and editing features will probably be good enough for most, although I found them cumbersome. The red eye correction tool was especially disappointing--black would bleed out into the eyelids and the eye "glint" was often wiped out.
Where Corel Photo Album stands out, however, is the photo sharing and presentation features. Album 5 offers many fun effects like frames and borders, stylish pre-designed templates, and 17 different ways to share your photos. You can create Video CD (VCD) slide shows, scrapbook pages, calendars, CD labels, Web galleries, greeting cards, e-cards, panoramas, and more. Version 5 has been enhanced with a clearer user interface, an easier step-by-step approach to projects, more ways to share, and a photo archiving system with automatic reminders. Deluxe Edition includes extra scrapbook templates, photo recovery software, 250 photos, and a starter pack of Avery paper and labels.
