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Software and Games : Software Categories : Graphics & Photo : Software, Categories, Graphics & Photo, All Graphics & Photo
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Microsoft
Digital cameras are outselling their analogue counterparts, but most imaging software seems to be designed for the business market. Microsoft’s Picture It! Photo & Print bucks that trend, with a seriously easy to use home alternative. It is also very comprehensive in the features it offers--and it’s a lot of fun. Whether sending a funky party invitation, designing a personal birthday card, sharing an album of your holiday snaps on the Web or just brightening up the task of labelling a parcel, Picture It! handles it all with ease.The whole process has been divided into three simple stages. Firstly, choose or create a design, add pictures and, finally, personalise the design by manipulating the pictures and adding text, images, sound and animation. There is ample help available at each step, even a guide with mini-movies offering inspiration, help and tips on how to make the most of the features.
There are a huge number of design templates offered on the CDs or on-line. Thankfully, these 13,000 designs are logically categorised by Type (cards, newsletter etc.) or by Activity/Occasion (birthday, wedding etc.) so searching for the right one is not too arduous. Once the design has been chosen the next step is to add images. If the images need to be uploaded via a digital camera or scanner Picture It! will fire up the relevant software and upload the files. There are also thousands of clip art images available; three of the four CDs included in the software contain around 75,000 images. And for those with Web access who need even more choice there is a link to another 100,000 images online.
However, the real fun starts with manipulating the images. All the usual features are available here–-adding borders, frames, text and shapes; rotating your picture; adjusting brightness and contrast et al--but there are also some seriously addictive transformations to indulge in. These range from helpful to just plain silly but fun. So while the image connoisseur in us is fine tuning a masterpiece by removing dust and scratches (or even red-eye and wrinkles!) the mischievous in us can skew the image, add a 3-D effect and then create the illusion that the viewer is looking through frosted glass. This latter feature is dangerously addictive. There are more illusions than a magician has up his sleeve and it’s almost impossible not try to them all out. Picture It! also features one great time-saving feature. A "mini-lab" allows basic manipulation of a number of images simultaneously.
Once the design project is complete sharing your pictures can range from easy to imaginative. Simply print them or have them printed professionally, e-mail them to friends or relatives, upload the design to the Web or go one step further and order custom t-shirts, mugs or mouse pads.
So, hire some Victorian costumes, take a family photo by the mantelpiece, add a sepia tint and the odd handlebar moustache and away you go... Adrian Spence
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Microsoft
Picture It! Photo and Print Studio is an easy-to-use photo retouching and publishing package complete with 150,000 images and 12,000 project templates to get you going. Newsletters, greetings cards, calendars and invitations are just a few of the print-based ideas but you can also design Web pages and then upload them onto your server or send animated e-mail. There are plenty of tools to enhance or distort photos according to your whims. The interface is simple and straightforward; you just drag and drop elements onto your project and then adjust them by choosing items from drop-down menus. To kick start your imagination Microsoft have also included helpful movies to illustrate how to touch-up photos or add movement and sounds to animation.To get the most out of Picture It! Photo and Print Studio you will need a printer, a modem and either a scanner or a digital camera. You will need a whopping 980MB of free hard drive space to install it and be running Internet Explorer 5.5, although it is automatically installed it you don't already have it. If you fancy impressing people with animated e-mail you should note that they are sent as EXE file attachments and will only run under Windows! Picture It! Photo and Print Studio comes on five CD-ROMs and you will be constantly feeding them in and out when working so must make sure you always keep them safe and to hand otherwise you are stuck.
If you can cope with all that, Picture It! Photo and Print Studio is a comprehensive, slick and simple package that will have anyone producing sleek graphics and animation! --John Cranmer
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Microsoft
Picture It! Print Studio is an easy-to-use publishing package complete with 100,000 images and 6,500 project templates to get you going. Newsletters, greetings cards, calendars and invitations are just a few of the print-based ideas, but you can also send animated e-mail or design Web pages and then upload them onto your server.The interface is simple and straightforward; you just drag and drop elements onto your project and then adjust them by choosing items from drop-down menus. To kick start your imagination Microsoft have also included helpful movies to illustrate how to touch up photos or add movement and sounds to animation.
To get the most out of Picture It! Print Studio you will need a printer, a modem and either a scanner or a digital camera. You will need a whopping 790MB of free hard drive space for Microsoft's recommended installation and be running Internet Explorer 5.5 although it is automatically installed it you don't already have it. If you fancy impressing people with animated e-mail you should note that they are sent as EXE file attachments and will only run under Windows! Picture It! Print Studio comes on four CD-ROMs and you will be constantly feeding them in and out when working so you must make sure you always keep them safe and to hand otherwise you are stuck. If you can cope with all that Picture It! Print Studio is a comprehensive, slick and simple package that will have anyone producing sleek graphics and animation! --John Cranmer
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Microsoft
Works Suite 2002 is an ideal home and family-computing office applications solution, at a terrific price, available in both CD-ROM and DVD-ROM versions, containing six complete products-Microsoft Works, Word 2002 Upgrade, Money 2002 Standard, AutoRoute Great Britain & Europe 2002, Encarta 2002 Standard and Picture It! Photo 2002.Word 2002 Upgrade
If you use a PC, you almost certainly use the Office productivity suite. Word 2002 is the word-processing package in Microsoft's new version--Office XP. With many new features such as Task Panes, Smart Tags and integrated e-mail, there is even more functionality in this application. Task Panes are dynamic windows that pop up in response to specific actions you're performing within a document--suggesting, formatting or mail-merge options, for example. Smart Tags, similarly, are icons that appear when you perform a particular task: hover over them and a dropdown menu appears.
Read Amazon.co.uk's review
Money 2002 Standard
Whether you're creating a monthly budget or planning a complex investment portfolio, Microsoft's Money 2002 is a strong and dependable tool for managing your money and helping you reach your financial goals. Easy to set up, with features such as Web integration and online services providing you with access to your financial data as you shop, invest or pay bills, you'll soon have your household budget and accounts in order.
Read Amazon.co.uk's review
Encarta 2002 Standard
Encarta Standard is the new edition of Microsoft's bestselling reference tool, this edition bringing new features and loads of new content and add-ons, such as auto-updates and streaming media. The interface itself is quite easy to get to grips with, although stylistically just a little bit boring. It is clean and uncluttered however, and because of this it moves quickly from screen to screen. The search is very good, and offers the functionality surfers are used to on the best search engines, such as word substitutions in case of misspelling, and lists of similar entries, as well as loads of links to editorially screened non-Microsoft quality content sites, on specific topics. Those familiar with the Windows operating system will find navigating this software very easy. At the top is the usual toolbar, with File, Edit, View, Features, Tools and so on. The easy reach of these menus make moving around the software simple, and stress-free, as well as quick to learn.
Read Amazon.co.uk's review
AutoRoute Great Britain & Europe 2002
Route planning software is always very popular and looking at the capabilities of AutoRoute 2002 it is not surprising. This CD-ROM is full of tweaks and twists beyond its central function of producing journey plans, including a database of potential stopping-off points for any trip, ranging from ATMs, railway stations and hospitals, to golf courses, museums and sports facilities, via places to eat, shop and stay--you can get the software to show as many or as few types of place as you like along a chosen route, and to search any radius round a point you desire.
Read Amazon.co.uk's review
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Microsoft
Microsoft Works Suite 2003 is a set of five CDs which comprises Works 7.0 with its integrated word processor, spreadsheet, database and calendar and adds full copies of Word 2002, Encarta Standard Edition 2003, Money 2003, Picture It Photo and AutoRoute 2002. Given the individual retail cost of these extra products, it represents excellent value for money.The Works 7.0 core is very task-based. For example, if you choose to "Manage a club" you'll end up using the spreadsheet to track finances, the database for membership records, Word to design the newsletter, and Picture It to handle your club photos. By organising its interface around things to do rather than old-style menus of programs, Works encourages novices to explore its wide range of features; once you know what you're doing, you can use the programs menu to jump straight to the applications themselves.
The extras (even the year-old AutoRoute) are really worth having. Word is the most widely used word processor in the world and it never hurts to have a copy on your home PC, while Picture It Photo has a decent selection of mainstream photo projects (calendars, address cards, flyers, kids ID cards and so on) to go with its easy-to-use editing features for removing red eye, adding picture frames and text to photos, cropping and framing photos or preparing them for use on the Web.
Elsewhere, Money 2003 remains the friendliest of home finance programs, with good investment tracking and an excellent, customisable front summary page. AutoRoute 2002 still sets the pace for getting from A to B in Europe. The standard version of Encarta 2003 is a good study aid for juniors upwards; it's updatable via the Web and it incorporates more than 30,000 articles and images along with videos, animations and audio.
Microsoft Works Suite 2003 is simple enough to allow beginners to accomplish a wide range of home computing tasks. Thanks to the inclusion of Word, it will also appeal to the workaholic who just won't let go. --Rob Beattie
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Microsoft
Picture It! Photo Standard is a friendly photo-editing program that makes it easy to get pictures onto your PC, from either a digital camera or scanner, and then edit them.The editing facilities are surprisingly powerful, too. Aside from bread-and-butter features, such as being able to remove red-eye, adjust the brightness, contrast, sharpness, crop down to a specific area and so on, you can apply a wide selection of filters to transform your photos into realistic works of art that appear to have been created in different mediums, including pencil, charcoal and water colours. Unlike many programs, if you pick the right photo, the results are realistic and the quality of the effect is excellent. Picture It! Photo Standard also makes it easy to cut out a section of a picture to use in another photo and you can also add text, format it as you would with a word processor and then apply textures, rotate it, increase the size and so on. As you add new elements to a photo, the program displays each one in a stack at the right of the screen--and because each item in the stack occupies its own layer it can be moved in front of or behind other layers to create interesting effects. Budding artists will appreciate the simple drawing features that allow you to embellish photos freehand, while those with no artistic talent get a wide range of pre-drawn shapes and colourful photo-quality stamps, which can pressed into service.
There are some clever batch-processing features with which you can, for example, rename an entire folder of photos with a single title and have Picture It! Photo Standard automatically add an identifying number after each one. Similarly, the "Mini Lab" lets you adjust the balance, colour, contrast, tint and size of a number of photos at the same time.
Picture It! Photo Standard conceals considerable functionality beneath its friendly face and is a good choice for home use. --Rob Beattie
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Corel
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Corel
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Corel
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Corel
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Corel