JASC Paint Shop Photo Album 5

The secret to managing digital camera images is to have a clear workflow, and that's exactly what you get with the latest version of Paint Shop Photo Album.

The interface is divided up into easily understood task tabs. The first is Organize, which lets you download images directly from your digital camera, before managing them as thumbnail previews; these are now instantly resizable. PSP Album takes a traditional tree-based folder approach to storing your photos. You can also find images based on keywords and date using the new Calendar view.

This is also where you can access the new PhotoSafe feature, which lets you copy images to CD/DVD, either as a job lot, or just those that haven't yet been archived. Removable media can now be catalogued, with thumbnails visible without needing the disk in the drive.

The next tab is Enhance which, apart from red-eye removal, has three main options: a one-click QuickFix; a four-step Adjust Wizard that lets you choose between three different settings for colour, exposure, vividness and sharpness; and the tabbed Adjust dialog, which offers greater control over features such as backlighting/flash, brightness and contrast. Unfortunately the dialog previews for the Adjust commands are just too small to make clear decisions so, if you're using Paint Shop Pro Studio, your best bet is to quickly open the images into that for editing.

Next up is the Create tab. This now has six major project types: album pages, greetings cards, books, e-cards, calendars and CD labels. This version of PSP Album includes hundreds of additional templates and royalty-free photos, as well as a utility for recovering photos from damaged media cards, but the options are otherwise spartan.

Finally, there's the Share tab. Here you can output your photos (multiple prints to a page), view them onscreen or turn them into a screensaver. New options include burning to CD with two-clicks and new templates for web galleries. You can also create VideoCD slide shows for DVD playback, complete with a basic embedded player for PC playback.

PSP Album 5 still lags well behind the powers of Photoshop Elements, but its folder-based handling requires less input from the user. If you're just looking for a cheap way to manage your photos it's a worthy choice.x

Author: Tom Arah