By Eleanor T. Culling
www.eleanorstravels.com

Right from the start I want to recommend this program for anyone who does not want to necessarily purchase a full-blown image editing program. There are a number of programs on the market that claim to do what Paint Shop Pro Album does, but none that I know of do all these chores so well. Jasc says "Everything you need to enhance, organize and share your digital photos." In this tutorial I'm primarily going to touch on the ENHANCE aspects. You can click on many of the thumbnails to see the screenshots full size. Some may be a bit slow to load but none are over 60kb. Later you can go to Jasc's site to read about ORGANIZE and SHARE.

Let's begin with the menus and tools. Too often in the past these have been too 'cute' to suggest that a program was serious and not just aimed at amateurs. These are simple and straight forward!

This program offers a very fine BROWSER as well as tabs along the left to access INFO, KEYWORDS and SEARCH.

I'm especially impressed with all the print possibilites that PSPA offers. On the left you can see many of the print size selections available (there are 40 templates from which to choose) and, in the right screen capture, the choices for adding other information for headers, footers and captions etc.

It should be mentioned at this time that the HELP files are among the best I have seen ... in any program ... extremely complete!

Now let's take a look at the Image drop-down menu:

Notice there there are three ways to approach enhancing and preparing an image for either printing or for including in a web page: Quick Fix, an Adjust Wizard which will step you through adjustments for color, exposure, vividness and sharpness (examples below) and Adjust which will do the same thing with a different approach offering more control (Page 2).

Adjust with Auto Fix

Before
Auto Fix will adjust color, contrast and brightness with one click.

After
You probably won't use this too often. Sometimes it makes only the smallest amount of change. Plan to use one of the next two methods for better results.

Adjusting with the Adjust Wizard

Step 1: Brightness and Contrast

With these examples notice the Zoom, Pan, Preview and Apply features at the top left and the excellent Tips at the bottom.

Step 2: Exposure

You'll probably need to work with this setting if your images have been acquired directly from your digital camera.

Step 3: Vividness otherwise known as saturation.

Step 4: Sharpness

I'm afraid I have to recommend that you don't use this method for sharpening a photo, but rather fine-tune with the other method offered by the program. See Sharpness below in the next set of examples (page 2).

Part 2 >>

 By Eleanor T. Culling
www.eleanorstravels.com