The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2.0 Bernadette Houghton bernieh@iaccess.com.au

Adobe PhotoDeluxe (APD)is a cunningly powerful image-editing program aimed at beginning graphic artists. Its step-by-step guided activities are easy to follow, and once you've become familiar with it you can get right down to the nitty gritty and access its tools directly.

APD supports a large range of file formats, including Web formats such as interlaced GIF and JPEG. It ships with Adobe Type Manager, as well as 500 templates, fonts, clipart images and sample photos. While this is not a lot compared to the number offered by competing image-editing packages, the offerings (particularly the templates) are of especially good quality.

Installation

Installation is very quick and easy, and proceeded without a hitch on my machine. If you expect to use APD's Internet feature, Adobe Connectables, be sure to select the Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) option on the setup screen. Adobe Connectables uses certain features of MSIE, which plug in seamlessly to PhotoDeluxe.

The Interface

PhotoDeluxe's main screen offers a choice of six options, including Get Photo, Special Effects, Cards & More, Internet, Send and Advanced. Each button leads to a series of tabs and sub-tabs offering further activities, ranging from simple touch ups through to creating photo albums and screen savers. The tabs are well organised and at the lowest level are numbered to help you complete the steps methodically. Clue cards offer further assistance and tell you when its time to go on to the next step.

Unlike most competing programs, where guided activities take the form of wizards or experts asking you questions, APD expects a little more user involvement. Instead of simply answering questions, you follow step-by-step instructions and invoke tools yourself. Depending on your point of view, this can be good or bad - you'll have to participate a little more, but you'll also find that you're ready to progress to APD's advanced features much sooner.

In Guided mode, there is a minimal menu and you can have only one document open at a time. Once you move into Advanced mode, a more detailed menu appears, giving you direct access to all tools, and the freedom to use them any way you wish. In this mode, you can open multiple windows. Optionally, you can choose to have detailed menus present at all times.

Adobe Connectables

APD's Adobe Connectables feature plugs extra Guided Activities from Adobe, Family PC and Avery into APD's interface. Among other activities, there are new special effects and stationery templates. The activities look and work exactly like any other Guided Activity, except that they'll load a little slower as they have to download from the Internet. Adobe claims that it adds new activities every month.

Painting and Editing Tools

PhotoDeluxe offers a well-rounded choice of painting and editing tools. Apart from the standard tools such as Brush, Smudge and Clone, there is a Color Change tool which fills adjacent areas within a specific colour tolerance. A Text tool offers basic text editing and there are also Distort and Perspective tools, although they don't work on text.

I was pleased with APD's range of selection tools and their flexibility, although many are accessible only through the Advanced menu bar. Apart from a few shape selection tools (rectangle, oval, etc), there is a freeform tool and a Color Wand that selects colours within a specified colour range. A SmartSelect tool intelligently selects areas of uniform colour as you trace roughly around an object (e.g. an apple in a bowl of fruit). You can choose multiple selections, and add to or subtract from existing selections. Selection tools double as drawing tools.

APD supports layering, and you can control how images on one layer blend with the underlying layers. For instance, you can make some layers semi-transparent, or cause them to blend into the underlying image in different ways.

Retouching tools

If your photos didn't turn out perfectly, it's easily fixed. Remove red eyes in a step or two, cut out messy backgrounds with a click and a drag, and adjust the colour, brightness or contrast in a few seconds. A one-step Instant Fix tool makes automatic adjustments without further user intervention, although it works best with photos needing only minor corrections. If you're not sure what kind of adjustments to make, the Getting Started Guide offers a useful summary.

Special Effects

There are over 30 special effects, including Posterize, Silhouette, Blur and Crackle. A particularly interesting effect is Trick Scale, which allows you to combine elements from multiple documents to create composite images. Further effects are available by using Adobe Connectables or by plugging in any third party filter which conforms to the Adobe PhotoShop standard. You can preview most effects before applying them, and control their application with slider controls.

Output

Any image-editing program aimed at beginners would not be complete without a selection of templates. PhotoDeluxe offers a good-looking, although limited, choice which you can use as they are or adapt to your own requirements. There are cards, calendars, photo albums, letterheads, labels and even t-shirt transfer templates among others. To use a template, you drag it from a gallery, then drop your desired photo into the space waiting for it on the template; images resize without further ado.

You can e-mail photos or other output directly using Windows messaging. If you use a different e-mail program, APD helps you prepare a JPEG compressed file instead which you can attach to your messages. You can preview your work before printing or print multiple copies of an image on a single page.

The only time I had problems with APD was when creating screen savers; I got myself into terrible messes here. The Guided Activities miss a step or two, and it took several attempts for me to get the knack of it. However, this is no big deal since it's much easier to create screen savers using EasyPhoto, the photo organiser shipped with PhotoDeluxe.

While you can create eye-catching bitmap images from scratch in APD, the real fun comes from tarting up your own photos and adding snazzy effects. Before you can do this, though, you'll have to get your photos into your computer. APD allows you to download them directly from a digital camera, video-frame grabber or scanner; alternatively, you can have them placed onto disk at the time of processing or afterwards. Once you've got the photos into your computer, you'll want an easy method of organising them. Enter, EasyPhoto.


With EasyPhoto, you can organise your photos into as many galleries as you wish and give each photo a title and a caption of up to 256 characters. It doesn't matter how or where you archive the original file, as EasyPhoto stores thumbnails of each photo in its database. To find specific photos, you can search on any word, word fragment or phrase appearing in the title or caption. Interestingly, EasyPhoto also searches for photos that resemble another. I'm not entirely sure how this feature works, though. The online help doesn't explain, and I had no luck retrieving photos which I deemed to resemble each other; EasyPhoto would retrieve only identical photos.

You can access EasyPhoto from within PhotoDeluxe, but you'll need to open it up separately to use the full range of features, including its search tool. Each gallery opens in a separate window, and you can easily re-arrange photos among galleries by dragging and dropping. You can also create portable slide shows and wallpaper, and nominate a specific gallery to act as a basic screen saver.

As a photo organiser, EasyPhoto does a good job within its limitations. And it does have some limitations - you can't change the size of the thumbnails, for instance. However, it also has a simple image editor which can remove scratches and red eyes, and adjust the colour balance and brightness/contrast. I found it very easy to use and it did a great job of correcting scratches and minor exposure problems in my tests.

Assessment

PhotoDeluxe offers a well-rounded choice of tools and an easily navigated interface. However, its real beauty lies in the fact that you can work in as simple or complex an environment as you wish. There is a fairly good Getting Started Guide and video tutorial, and you can expand PhotoDeluxe's functionality with Adobe Connectables or third party plug-ins. The templates - although limited in number - are of terrific quality.

Easy Photo offers basic photo management and editing features. You can use it on its own or send your images along to PhotoDeluxe for further manipulation. The only time I had problems with PhotoDeluxe was when creating screen savers, but this turned out to be a glitch of no real account, since you can create them more easily in EasyPhoto anyway.

My verdict: an excellent image-editing program for beginners and intermediates.

Reprinted from the April 1998 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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