Corel Photo Album 7 Deluxe

It's not for lack of knowing my way around a computer. I'm a digital artist, and this kind of stuff is what I do, but I decided I wanted a little quickie way to combine some photos into animated albums for my blog and to share with friends on CDs.

Well, first of all, the only fun part of the program, Smile Box, costs an additional $39.95 a YEAR if you plan to burn your slide show to CD, post it online, or even save it, and the simpler slide show is just plain, no embellishments, sound, nothing. The rest of it is clunky images for "scrapbook pages" and stuff that would be appropriate for an 8 year old child to use.

Really wishing I'd researched this one a bit further. I have Corel Painter, PhotoShop, PaintShop Pro, and lots of other amazing software. This isn't one of them.

Corel Photo Album 7 has a lot of nice features for basic photo work. It starts with a launcher that you keep from displaying if you like or you can just use the mail program window. It does take a while to start up and after installation adds a photo downloader mini app to your system tray. This is set to start whenever Windows does. I disabled it because I don't download that many photos. Corel has a nice array of features both to do smaller fixes for photos with the edit and enhance pane. Any major work that you would need for photos would require a larger application like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. This version is for people who like to create different photo projects like collages, certificates, egreeting cards, calendars, album pages and a fun option called magazine covers. It also includes a very nice selection of clip art that you can use in other documents. Photo Album 7 also allows you to share your photos via email or upload them to printing service if you don't like printing them at home. You can do some basic work with video and burn photos to DVD, but Roxio Media Creator or Nero would be better options for those tasks. The program does come with a nice user guide, but when you are in the program menus the extra options aren't as obvious as they should be. The program is somewhat slow when loading pictures from folder albums. There are a lot programs vying for attention to handle photos and this one doesn't stand out much from the rest. If you are a creative type who enjoys scrapbooks, art and creating your own photo handiwork, this program is a nice fit for a mimimal price. Picasa is cleaner, faster and free. It has face recognition and geo tagging. Corel has some catching up to do in this area. All in all, it is a pleasant program, but I would prefer a cleaner faster program without all the extra art options to manage my photos. I give it three out of five stars.

This is a very nice little photo editing program that allows even the novice (me) to fix photo faux pas without spending hours poring over a manuel or a help screen. Wanna whiten teeth, no problem and it looks good too. Wanna add a suntan, you can do that easily as well, though that doesn't look all that good. Wanna make a calendar or a fake magazine cover, you can do it with Corel Photo Album 7 and you can do it without reading the manuel. You can make greeting, birthday, Christmas or any other kinds of cards too, so no more shopping at the Hallmark Store for that perfect card, because you can design one just the way you like.

Again I'll say it, this is a nice little program that does just what I want it to do, plus it automatically organizes your photos, I had almost five hundred photos on my computer and the program had no problem with them. I like the way I can turn a photo into black and white or sepia without any effort and I like the automatic color enhancement. So far every time I've asked the program to automatically fix the color it's improved the photo. I don't see how anyone could go wrong with this software.

Oh yes, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the excellent redeye removal that this software does. That's way cool. Nobody wants their little darlings to look like little devils.

I had trouble installing this on my Netbook running Windows 7. Waiting for Photo Album 8.

It's not photoshop but its very good for the price. I purchased mine from
amazon.com. It arrived quicly and performed well. If you don't need the power of photoshop you should be verryhappy with this product.