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If you're an avid digital photographer or even if you only occasionally fill a memory card with images, you'll find Paint Shop Photo Album 4 an essential tool. It handles just about anything you could want to do with your shots as an interested enthusiast. From collecting them together into albums to making video CDs, from stitching together shots into panoramas to arranging prints to make the best use of expensive photo paper, the program is a master of simplicity. The top-level view is browse mode, where you see the file structure of your computer down the left-hand pane and thumbnails of the images in any open album on the right. A menu bar across the top offers album-level functions. To fill a new album you can download images directly from a camera or import them from any folder on your PC, simply by opening it. Double-clicking on an image moves you to album mode, where you see thumbnails down the left and an enlarged single image on the right. Here you can apply standard transformations, such as rotation, cropping or brightness and contrast corrections. A couple of particularly useful features are available, which JASC
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calls Quick Fix and One Click Removal. Quick Fix is an automated correction filter that makes adjustments to your image automatically and is often good enough to improve its appearance with a single click. One Click Removal gives you a crosshair cursor that you can zero in on the irises of anyone in your picture showing the dreaded red-eye. It works reasonably well, but there's a red-eye brush too, if you want to take a more hands-on approach. Once you've assembled an album, you can prepare a Video CD, complete with menus and background music and burn it using any CD recorder for viewing on other PCs or standalone CD players. If you prefer to put your photos onto paper, the program has a wide variety of different templates to maximise the number of images you can squeeze onto each sheet. While these are very useful, it would be even better to be able to specify the combination of shots and sizes you want and get the software to calculate the optimum layout. Paint Shop Photo Album 4 is a remarkably useful piece of software for organising, touching up and displaying your digital photographs. --Simon Williams
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