Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 for Windows

Adobe Photoshop Album is a fast, easy way for digital photo collectors to organize, fix, share, & archive pictures without a lot of involvement. It's easy to learn and fulfills most essential needs of amateur photo collectors. Version 2.0 overcomes most of the limitations from 1.0 and adds useful features, but also introduces some new drawbacks and annoying interface changes.

More and more people are turning to digital photography for reasons of convienience and affordability. These users want the instant gratification that comes with digital photography and they want it to be as uncomplicated as possible. They simply want to take photos (usually lots of them), be able to find them quickly when needed, and share them in a variety of ways. In a market flooded with photo editing software, Adobe Photoshop Album does a remarkable job of addressing the most essential needs of typical digital photo collectors, while still keeping things simple.

One of the biggest problems faced by digital camera users is the sheer number of images that can be accumulated. The task of organizing and cataloging these files can be overwhelming, but it's essential if you want to be able to quickly put your hands on a specific photo. Traditionally, even the laziest person could scribble a note on the back of a printed photo or on an envelope of pictures. But the digital medium is non-tangible, and you can only go so far with folders and file names.

Photoshop Album eliminates the dependence on folders and file names, and in fact, shields the user from it almost entirely.

Digital cameras have made a huge impact in the world of photography. Digital cameras allow users to take dozens, if not hundreds, of pictures at a time. 

The problem is keeping the darn things organized once they’re on the computer. 

Adobe Systems offers help with that monstrous task with Photoshop Album 2.0, the newest version of its consumer software made especially for digital image organization and distribution. 

Photoshop Album 2.0 retains it basic image organization skills and adds quite a few new features. Photos can be tagged, grouped, printed, saved and distributed all from one program.     Digital photos can be imported from cameras, compact discs and other media or pulled from the hard drive. The photos are displayed in the Photo Well, the main portion of Album’s window. The Tags pane allows you to organize the photos into general categories or specific groups. 

Borrowing from its namesake, Album offers a few editing tools to let you spiff up your photos. The new one-click fix does a pretty good job of taking care of photos, or you can do fixes individually. The software lets you adjust color, lighting or sharpness. There’s a red-eye fix, a cropping tool, and new filters that let you change your photo to black and white or a sepia tone. 

There are a lot of features in Album, but the Timeline and Calendar are probably my favorites. They’re excellent at helping organize photos, and they make it a lot easier to find photos taken or uploaded at particular times. 

The Timeline stretches across the top of the Photo Well, where the images are displayed. It looks like a cross between a ruler and a bar graph. Actually, the little bars in the Timeline represent the number of photos taken or put on the computer at a specific date. The dates are listed across the bottom, and the bars above the dates can be clicked to bring up the photos taken or uploaded during that time. 

I was looking for a photo I put on my computer in the summer of 2001. I simply clicked on the bars shown over the summer months, and the photo I wanted popped up when I hit the bar representing photos taken in August. So not only did I find my photo, but I also discovered when I took it. 

The calendar view is another cool feature. Let’s say you took 10 photos on Sept. 7, 2002.

If you want to find those photos quickly, you simply go to that date in the calendar. You’ll see a thumbnail of the first of your 10 photos in the Sept. 7 square on the calendar. Clicking on the thumbnail brings up those photos in the photo well. 

Album isn’t just good at organization. It’s also good at distribution. Your photos can be used to create greeting cards, printable calendars, video compact discs, eCards (e-mail greeting cards), Web pages and even a photo book that can be ordered online. 

These projects are fairly easy to do, thanks to the Creation Wizard, which talks you through each project. My only complaint on this was in the greeting cards — I couldn’t get it to make halffold cards for me. It only made quarter-fold cards. No biggie, but it would be a nice option to add in the next version. 

I would recommend playing with the new Atmosphere creation feature in Album. It uses the new three-dimensional animation software to create a little "art gallery" where your photos are displayed on the walls.

You can then walk — virtually, of course — through the gallery and observe your photographic masterpieces. 

Album also adds new mobility features. It now allows you to transmit photos to mobile phones, provided they’re on compatible networks (they’re listed in the software). 

It also lets you send the photos to a Palm-compatible handheld device. That, too, depends on certain factors. Your handheld must be using Palm OS 4.0 or later, your PC must have Palm Desktop 4.0 or later, and you need Adobe Acrobat for Palm loaded on the handheld.

The latter can be found on Adobe’s Web site. The Palm software is available at Palm’s Web site (www.palm.com). 

There’s a few little things that I’d like to see added to Album.

I like all the printing options, but I do wish the template choices weren’t so limited, especially on the calendars. Also, while I like the Sharpen tool in the Fix commands, I wish there was a Blur tool as well. As a Photoshop user, I’m used to seeing one with the other, so to me it was a big absence. 

Overall, Photoshop Album is a good program with a lot of options. The new features definitely plug holes found in the previous version, though a few holes remain. 

But for those with hundreds of photos, Album provides excellent tools to organize and distribute digital images. 

Such software is a great way to relieve the organizational worries of digital shutterbugs.

Adobe Photo Software Now Makes it Easy To Create Albums

So you got a new digital camera for the holidays, and by now you've discovered what savvy computer users have known for years: The free software that comes with hardware products usually stinks. That means you now need a good software program to organize, touch up and share the thousands of digital pictures that are filling your computer's hard disk, or will be soon.

If you own a Macintosh, this problem is easily solved. Apple's iPhoto, the first good photo-organizing program, comes free on every Mac and still offers the best blend of simplicity and power in the industry.

It's a harder quest on Windows. While Windows XP does a nice job of handling photo files, Microsoft doesn't bundle anything like iPhoto. There are many photo-organizing programs for Windows, but most are too techie-oriented or too primitive.

Last year, I reviewed two then-new Windows programs attempting to match iPhoto: Picasa, from Lifescape Solutions, and Adobe Photoshop Album, from the famous graphics company. I picked Picasa, because it was easier to use, although less powerful than Photoshop Album. The Adobe program was built around a complex and labor-intensive organizing feature called tags, which attempted to categorize every picture.

A year later, Picasa still lacks the most important organizing feature in iPhoto: the ability to create virtual albums, or collections of photos, and to assign a single photo to more than one such album.

Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0

By contrast, Adobe has overhauled Photoshop Album for version 2.0, simplifying the user interface. The tagging system is still there, but it isn't front and center. And for people who don't want to use tags, Adobe has added the virtual-album feature, which it calls "Collections."

As a result, I believe Photoshop Album 2.0 is now the best choice for Windows users looking to manage their digital-photo collections. It still has lots of power and plenty of appeal to techies, but it's now more accessible to average users.

Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 costs around $45. You can download a free, stripped-down starter edition at www.adobe.com, but it lacks some of the key organizing and sharing features -- including the new Collections feature.

Like iPhoto, Photoshop Album 2.0 is organized into two main areas: a large window with thumbnails of all your photos, which Adobe calls the "Photo Well," and a sidebar that allows you to call up selected groups of those photos. In Adobe's case, this sidebar can show either your lists of virtual Collections or a list of tags.

The virtual-collections feature is the key to managing your photos without relying on a mastery of Windows folders and files. You can have a virtual album of your trip to Hawaii without worrying about whether all your pictures are in neatly organized folders and subfolders on your hard disk, with names relating to vacations or Hawaii. And virtual albums also spare users from having to be anal enough to add captions or tags to each and every picture.

With the new Collections feature in Photoshop Album 2.0, you can just use your mouse to select your pictures of Hawaii and turn them in seconds into a unified collection. You merely start a new collection called Hawaii and drag the thumbnails of the pictures into it. It's like creating a play list in a music program. The file containing the picture isn't moved or copied. But the software knows which pictures to display when you click on the name of the collection.

Any picture can be in multiple collections. So, the same picture might appear in your Hawaii collection, in a collection of photos of your husband and in a collection of photos of beaches you've visited.

Beyond the Collections feature, there's lots to like about Photoshop Album 2.0. You can re-size thumbnails by sliding a size bar, as in iPhoto. A terrific timeline at the top of the screen helps you locate photos by date. There's even a full-screen calendar with thumbnails of the photos associated with each date.

Simple touchups to pictures are easy to make right in the product, and you can dispatch a picture to a separate photo editor of your choice. You can convert slide shows you create into special PDF files, viewable on Windows PCs and Macs, even by people who don't have Photoshop Album. These files, which can be e-mailed, can contain music and titles for the slides.

One cool feature tries to find all the photos that have similar patterns or colors to a single picture you select. I tried this with a picture of my cat, and Photoshop Album found a bunch of other pictures of the cat.

There are some downsides to Photoshop Album. You have to know a special keyboard command to play back quickly a slideshow the program has created. You can't burn a slideshow onto a DVD. And when e-mailing a photo or slideshow, you have to use the program's own address book instead of your regular e-mail address book.

Worst of all, the program can be sluggish with even a few thousand photos. But Adobe deserves great credit for improving and simplifying Photoshop Album in version 2.0 and, in my view, it's the best choice for digital-camera owners with Windows PCs.