Views & Reviews |
PhotoRecall
Our son-in-law, in Plano, has started looking for all the old family pictures to create a pictorial family tree. Many of the old photos he’s using are ones that I’ve scanned and then sent to him over the Internet via e-mail. So you can understand why I h ave quite a few scanned photos on my hard disk. Among the various programs I’ve discovered to help me with my projects is one called PhotoRecall by G-A Imaging which allows me to create an online album of photos that I can organize, edit and print as well as other utility functions for the albums and photos. It also allows you to search the Internet for pictures, e-mail pictures via the Internet and create sli de shows.
PhotoRecall is a 32-bit program which needs Windows 95 or NT to run. You also will need a CD ROM to install the program. It uses at least 20 Mb of disk space and wants all the usual power things that Windows 95 likes such as a minimum of a 486 system.
A photo album can be created quickly and easily by having a search of your disk implemented and allowing the results create the album. I found this a quick and easy way of organizing my photos. The photos can be displayed as albums, bulletin boards, or 3 5MM film strips, but I prefer the “photo album” style in the small picture mode since I can view more photos on the screen at once. The default title under each picture is the file name and it can be changed by right clicking and selecting the properties dialog box and typing in the desired title. With the medium size pictures mode, the path for the picture will also show up under the picture and title.
The PhotoRecall Darkroom uses a large dialog box with many examples for the different gradations of the current effect being used. This way, you can change the red, green and blue color mix, as well as other types of effects, and see just what the result will be before you imple ment the change. There are quite a few special effects, too, such as making the photo look like a water color painting. Users who are not looking for the most sophisticated tools will like the photo editing functions and find they meet all their needs.
As I mentioned at the beginning, PhotoRecall allows the user to search for photos on the Internet. I decided to look for Halloween witches and found plenty! Once it finds something meeting the search criteria, it loads the picture on the screen and allow s the user to decide whether or not to add it to the photo album. This all worked quickly and efficiently. I got tired of the searching before the program finished looking! This is a very useful product for people working with photo collections on their hard disk or on Internet. I liked it and plan to keep on using it.
For more info go to G&A Imaging web site at http://www.ga-imaging.com or e-mail at ga-info@ga-imaging.com.
Betty Brooks is a HAL-PC member who can be contacted at halbetty@aol.com or bbrooks@hal-pc.org. Betty was our award-winning SysOp on the user group Forum on AOL and a frequent contributor.
Photo Studio
If you ever wanted to be a magician, put somebody behind bars or maybe just behead one of your relatives, Photo Studio may be your program. Photo Studio by Arcsoft is a photo editing tool for the home or small business. With Photo Studio, a user has the ability to change the look of pictures, crop or cut up pictures, even merge different pictures into one new and improved picture (Yes, you and Forrest Gump can now be shaking hands with John F. Kennedy). A nice feature as a home user is that with Photo Studio you can be adjusting or changing your pictures within 60 minutes of installation, no Graphical College degree is necessary. The toolset is limited, making Photo Studio easy to use but also making it less useful for large companies that sometimes need a more expensive program that comes with more bells and whistles.
Photo Studio has easy-to-use, 32 bit digital editing, color correction tools, a multitude of special effect filters and all of the basic create, retouch and paint image tools on a floating palette. It includes freehand, rectangle/elliptical section, clon ing, cropping, fills and text inputting. New effects like oil painting, film grain, splash, melt, ripple, motion blur and more are included. Layering is not supported. It comes with hundreds of pictures and is TWAIN compliant for use with most scanners. It now is even bundled with many digital cameras. Photo Studio reads, adjusts and saves a broad assortment of file formats (BMP, EPS, GIF, JPEG, PCD, PCX, TIFF, etc.) so program and Internet importing/exporting is easy. It also can use many of the compet ition plug-ins for enhanced manipulation. This program also comes with a 100+ transition slide show screen saver, an album manager and a second program called “Kai’s Power Goo” that maximizes morphing capabilities.
Photo Studio runs on Windows 3.1x, Windows 95 or Windows NT. It can run on a PC with as little as a 386 processor, 4 megs of RAM, 6 megs of hard space and only needs a VGA monitor. Photo Studio sells for $99.00 and is available as a free 30-day, trial, d ownload version from their Web site at http://www.arcsoft.com. Technical support is available on the web, through e-mail at ps_support@arcsoft.com or by phone, 510/440-9901, 8:30 to 5:30 Pacific Time M-F.
Todd Rosen, a HAL-PC member, is the Internet class instructor and Southwestern Bell Process Specialist.
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Last modified: 1997:09:30