| It is always interesting to see the improvements made to Adobe's software, in this case their second edition of their Photoshop Album...their very good photo-organizer. Their improvements really take us right up to date in the year 2004 with the program allowing for the sending of photos to email equipped cell phones and to TiVo TV Recorders. Mostly though, Adobe has improved or enhanced the features the program already has; let us take a look at the program: When you open Photoshop Album 2.0, you come to the screen below which gives you a choice as to how you want to work with your digital pictures:  Probably the first order of business is to access your photos and then to organize them. You can see below that your photos many be in many places, not just on the Hard Drive. But the Hard Drive is a good place to begin and when PhotoAlbum searches the Drives of your computer it finds all the graphics of any type and places them at your fingertips in what it calls the Photo Well.  Here is what the "Well" looks like. It is a great beginning, but I had 15,000 photos or graphics on my hard drive, so having them all in one place would take quite a while to scroll through the whole "well" in order to find what graphic I am looking for. Fortunately, Photoshop Album2.0 has a fine way of organizing these photos and graphics:  The means of organizing is through tags. You can see how easy this is to do below.  You select the category and then you tag the various pictures that you wish to be in that category. I can do the whole of my graphic system in this manner so that I can quickly access and view photos by theme:  The tagging is one method of viewing your pictures, but there is another that you can use by itself or in addition to the tagging which is most helpful. This method is by viewing the photos by the date they were taken. As you can see below, you can view them by the year you took them, the month, or the day. This is so helpful when you are looking for a photo you took and you know about when you took it but have no idea where it is on your hard drive:  In the "Well" there is a bar at the top with a date line by years and months. You slide the bar as I have done to say "Jan. 1, 2004 through Jan. 30, 2004" and then the photos which have that date tag on them appear as below:  Another nice feature is what you can do with the photos once you have organized them. Below you see that there are many different templates to place photos into nice looking Albums, Slideshows, Greetings Cards, Video CDs, Calendars which in Album 2.0 has many new choices. I have chosen here to make a slideshow of the photos you see above. This is quite easy to do and in this case, I am choosing to have the slideshow e-mailed as a single Adobe PDF file, which can be viewed on almost any computer:  There are many different choices for viewing the slideshow:  In addition to the template you can easily choose how many photos you want on each page, if you are going to play music in the background, how you wish to go from page to page, and how you want the viewer to control the slideshow once they have received it:  You then preview your slideshow to see it is the way you wish it:  And finally you have the finished product:  What a person who will be viewing the slideshow receives with the email are the two windows below that explain to the viewer what they are receiving and how to use it:  Also, you can do a minimum but quite easy fix on photos, fixing the lighting, color, and sharpening qualities as well as fixing the red eye in a photo and subjecting it to some filters as well:  The transformed photo is placed next to the original so that you can see the results as you adjust:  Finally, you can send the photo by a few simple clicks to whomever via your email as below:  In conclusion, Photoshop Album 2.0 is a very fine way to organize your photos at a reasonable price. I have included as well a listing of its features so that you can see the complete listing:  |