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Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0
********* 9 stars out of 10
Ben A Miller
Price - £39.99
The continuing boom in digi-scoping means many birders now regularly use digital cameras and camcorders. For those birders, getting the correct equipment at home to process the results can be almost as important as the kit used in the field. Adobe Photoshop has been the standard digital image editing software for a number of years, and now Adobe are launching a re-vamped suite of related software to help unleash to potential of digital photography.
Photoshop Album 2.0 is software to allow you to organise and catalogue all your digital photos (plus movies and sound records). This is a job I had happily been doing using the ‘My Pictures’ front-end in Windows XP through my own folder structures, so what does Photoshop offer over and above this?
Firstly, the user interface is excellent (and a vast improvement on old versions of Photoshop). Photos can be imported easily from hard disk, camera, CD or even a mobile phone or PDA, and showed as thumbnails. Once imported the photos can be edited, presented as slide shows or template albums, or sent to friends. Unless requested by the user the actual photo files stay in their original locations, so all previous cataloguing is not lost.
It is in categorising and searching photos that I found Photoshop Album really excelled. Adobe have created a ‘tag’ system which allows users to add any number of labels to their photos, and then search and limit photos according to the tags selected. A number of tags are predetermined, but users can add their own. I have a Birds tag, then sub-categories in that tag of species names. Hence, I can click on the Birds tag and only my photos of birds are shown, or then select a family or species tag to limit further.
I’ve never had the patience to rename all the photo files I take, so this system is a godsend. For example, after a local trip to see a Grey Phalarope at Wilstone Reservoir, Tring, I imported all my photos directly from the camera into Photoshop Album. By simply selecting the photos imported I tagged all the photos as ‘Birds’, ‘Grey Phalarope’, ‘Wilstone Reservoir’ and ‘Tring Reservoir’. At a later date I could ask for a Tring Reservoir slideshow, and enjoy the Phalarope again alongside the Least Sandpiper and Great White Egret of the summer.
While Photoshop Album is no replacement for your editing software it does offer a limited range of easy-to-use editing tools. For example brightness and sharpness can be altered and pictures cropped. The best editing tool I found, however, is a very easy-to-use red eye remover.
Adobe Acrobat Reader 6 is included, and Photoshop Album can save photos (or selections of photos) as pdf files. The print interface is excellent, and the application has a clever back-up system to burn your photos safely onto CD. A number of fun features, such as wizards to create photo albums and on-screen slide shows, will appeal to some as will the integrated on-line print ordering service.
This is the first photograph album software that I have been convinced by, and have now catalogued all my photos in it. The tag system is a great idea and, coupled with the flexible and user-friendly interface, it’s a pleasure to use. Recommended – 9/10.
Note this software is hardware hungry, and designed to run on modern machines. It recommends users to have a Pentium 3 or 4 processor, 128KB min RAM, 250MB hard-disk space and Windows XP, ME or 2000.
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