by Ken Kamber
Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album is a new name but it is not a new product. It is a significant improvement on a good product that has several names previous versions were called Image Expert 2000, Jasc After Shot (a rename of the product after purchase by Jasc) and Dell Picture Studio, Image Expert Premium.
Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album is the best product that I have used to enhance, organize and share images. Although I have reviewed a beta product, I have found no bugs and would consider it ready for final release.
The first item on the list of new items for Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album is the capability of making Video CDs (VCD) for the distribution of image shows. I tested this by using a slide show I had prepared with the use of Microsoft Power Point. The PowerPoint presentation had 424 images with text descriptions for each image and had been saved as JPEGs. Thus I had a folder with 424 JPEG files that each contained a photographic image with a text description for each image. When I opened the folder containing the 424 JPEG images in Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album, I found I had a sorting problem. PowerPoint assigns numbers to slides using a variable number of digits. This means that slide 2 did not follow slide 1 in the Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album name sort. Slide 2 followed slide 199. I had to rename many of the PowerPoint JEPG files so that all slides had 3 digits. Slide 2 became slide 002 and slide 20 became slide 020. Once I had renamed the 1 and 2 digit slides into three digit slides, the sort by name worked properly. An email from tech support at Jasc gave me an easier solution. I sorted by PowerPoint by date and then did an automatic rename. I still had to rename a few files, but it was a far easier solution for using PowerPoint files.
A left mouse click on the Video CD icon at the top of the
Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album screen opens the VCD layout screen
and an
additional VideoCD Getting Started Guide window to help those new to creating video
CDs. It is nice that one can turn this window off when is no longer needed. One
has a choice of having a single album or multiple albums in the VCD. A single
album in the VCD has the advantage that inserting the VCD in a DVD player or
computer will result in the show being self starting. The disadvantage is that,
if one has many images, one must have a very large sound file or the sound file
could be repeated enough to become annoying.
Having multiple albums on the VCD results in a menu appearing after the VCD is inserted. One can adjust the number of images in each album to match the length of the sound file. I chose a single album and found it easy to follow the directions to add a sound file and create the VCD. Once started, the program took about 25 minutes to create the VCD containing 424 images. It looked like the CD burner software installed on my computer was not used. The one problem I had was the text on the bottom was not seen in most images on the VCD. This was due to the television display not showing the edges of the images. It was solved by going back to the PowerPoint presentation and moving the text block up from the very bottom of the image then saving the presentation as JPEG images and creating a new VCD using Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album.
The second time through was a breeze. The resulting VCD was self starting, producing great sound and video signal when used in my APEX DVD player which was supposed to be able to play VCDs. The VCD almost worked in my older Phillips Dual Scan DVD player. On this player the video was great but Page 10 the music was horrible. The Phillips player plays excellent MP3 files and did not claim to play VCDs. The VCD, using Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album, has become my primary method of distributing images to friends and family. The addition of the ability to include image titles, image descriptions and variable timing for each image in the VideoCD is suggested for the next version of Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album.
The second new item listed by Jasc is the Adjust Wizard, which is
reached by left mouse clicking on the adjust icon.The adjust wizard permits one to easily adjust images by
simply choosing the best image out of the three images presented in each of the
four steps. It was very easy to use. The end result appeared very similar to
the correction I got by choosing the “quick fix” icon. I will probably go to the
Adjust Wizard when the quick fix icon doesn’t satisfy me. In my use of previous
versions of this program I have found the “Quick Fix” to be excellent. If I use
the “Quick Fix” on most good images, I see no change. On bad images, I find
great improvement. The use of “Quick Fix” on portraits is a manner of personal taste.
One of several new features not listed is the ability to switch rapidly between three different sized thumbnail sizes. In the last version of this program one could determine the thumbnail size but could not switch rapidly to another size. It is handy to rapidly switch from a very small thumbnail for large folders/albums to large thumbnails when it is necessary to see more detail in the thumbnails to determine which one to choose or open.
The slide show feature was one I used a lot in previous versions. When I had to go to manual mode, I didn’t like having to left mouse click on the very small forward or reverse icons in the menu. The new version allows the use of the keyboard space key and “enter” key to manually advance the slide show and the arrow keys to go forward and back as well as to the first and last images. This is much better for slide shows with voice narration attached to each slide. With fixed slide duration, one must use fairly long slide durations and time each slide narration so as to not exceed the slide dwell time. This version has made a good slide show even better. The ability to make and distribute slide shows with options of having tittles, descriptions and being able to determine the slide duration is one of the strong points of the program.
Being able to find to find images with a minimum of work is
important when one has thousands of images. Image Expert/After
Shot was the program
I used. Almost all programs permit the use of assigning key words to images and
allowing a search of key words. The problem is in not having multiple key words
for the same item. If I had a picture that I was in, I could assign keys words
like Ken, Kenneth, self, me, kkamber, Kenneth Kamber, Kenneth T. Kamber. To
find all the pictures I was in, I would have to do a search of all the key
words. Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album put a structure to key words that can be
changed as needed.
If I wanted to find all of the images containing both my wife and me, I would do one search on the two words “Ken and Ethel” and get the results of searching through 5 to 10 thousand images in seconds. The automatic backup of this valuable database is a big plus. One of the problems with data base is that file movements must be made within the program for the database to be valid. Using another program to move files creates errors in the data base. If one puts all images in one folder, one can right mouse click and export data to each folder and sub folder as pspa.dbt files. If these folders are moved to new locations with another program, the Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album data can be made current by importing the information from the pspa.dbt files. If one wants to make room on their hard drive by saving images to CDs as slide shows and then deleting the images on the hard drive, one can preserve the key word data by exporting the information to each slide show folder and placing the corresponding pspa.dbt files in the slide show directories prior to the burning of the CDs. This results in each folder of images in the CD containing both a pspa.dbt and an ixdb.txt file. Paint Shop Photo Album has made the database even better with the incorporation of the database backup feature.
The outstanding printing capabilities present in previous version of this program appear unchanged. The program presents many choices of stander sizes, custom sizes and multiple prints per page. The ability of adjusting the exact image position on a page has made the use of a paper trimmer unnecessary.
SUMMARY
Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album has taken a good program and made it better by significant improvements in the new version. Some of the outstanding parts of the program are the VCD/Slide Show capabilities, the image editing capability, the database capabilities, the printing capability, and the ease of use. I consider it a worthwhile upgrade. The final product is available now from www.jasc.com for $49 for new users and $29 for upgrades. Jasc continues to offer free unlimited technical support for all users, by both phone and email. I have never had to use the phone support but have found the email support to be excellent. A free trial version is available at the Jasc website at http://www.jasc.com. One may use the trial program for 30 days before upgrading to the regular version with no loss of data when upgrading.
From our May 2003 newsletter
Membership in WINNERS is $20 annually for individuals with $5 for each additional family member. The newsletter is emailed to the members in PDF format.
 |
Winners is a member of the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG) is an international, platform-independent, nonprofit corporation (incorporated in Washington, DC) devoted to helping user groups throughout the world. Almost 400 user groups are members of APCUG. http://www.apcug.net/ |