Wednesday 14 April 2010

A-doing Adobe ..... and other sorry tales of software

Thinking long and hard about Adobe Photoshop and its variations. A discount page HERE makes it a little easier to decide! I'm tempted by Light Room although it's probably a tad too complicated for the likes of me. We'll see.

Speaking of software I downloaded FotoSlate 4 from ACDSee. It lets me print regular print sizes and invites me to tweak my printed settings to make them fit the printer. Well, duh, I could already do that without paying for more software. I'll try and find time to study it and write a proper review. Now the ACDSee Photo Manager, on the other hand, looks like it will be a boon. Tags that stay there no matter where you upload your photos!! Brilliant. I have the latest version pre-ordered. I'll have to clear my desk in the next few weeks so I have time to play with it!

So far I'm finding Paint Shop Album 4 is the best for faffing around before printing. I bought PS Album 5 to get to "thinify" feature (vain or what?) but it goes really weird when I'm batch resizing. Basically it resizes to a random size, not the size you've asked for. Stupid. Fortunately versions 4 and 5 run alongside each other.

Best of all - let Snapfish or your favourite processor do the printing! It really isn't worth all the effort and angst doing it yourself. I use Snapfish for photobooks and regular prints (for the occasional paper scrapbooking I do!) and Photobox for 8 x 8 prints since Snapfish don't do those. Maybe they will if we nag enough. Click on the banner on your right to get 30 free prints. Free is always good!

30 free prints? It seems to be 40 right now. Even better ...

Thursday 8 April 2010

Scrapbooks for the Horswill and Hills Families

Some of you - well, my family ....duh - may know about a huge project called the Horswill and Hills Families Photo Archive Project. You can see the site HERE.

It has basically one aim and that is to get HIGH RESOLUTION family photos out there for the family to share. Online sharing is a wonderful thing but in one or two generations no-one is going to be able to print family photos as the resolution gets continually squished by big servers like Facebook. If you want to know what I mean about resolution (or want to be able to explain it to someone else) see my article HERE.

As well as being able to access and download high res photos from Flickr we're going to make family scrapbooks. Yes, this is all a big excuse to make more scrapbooks. Digital, naturally, made using easy peasy My Memories Suite.

Now I just have to find a way to fit work in the day...