Whether one is photo editing, photo sharing, or album art managing, there are currently several software programs that combine these features, efficiently multi-task, manage the system memory, and print good quality photos all at once. While, the popular photo editing tools today are Photoshop Illustrator and Elements by Adobe (www.adobe.com), PaintShop Photo Pro by Corel (www.corel.com), and Apple ArtStudio (http://www.iphoneclan.com/artstudio/) for iPad tablets, the creative photographer can use the free apps Picasa by Google , SugarSync (formerly Sharpcast Photos) (http://www.sugarsync.com), Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) by Yahoo, and Shutterfly (http://www.shutterfly.com/) for sharing online albums, creating cards, and printing personalized stationery (though one can upload and store photos into their Facebook (www.facebook.com) or MySpace (www.myspace.com) accounts for social networking with friends).
Adobe’s photo editing suite includes the popular Photoshop Elements version 9, Illustrator CS 5, and Creative Suite 5 for $99.99. These products offer a complete solution to the graphic designer incorporating the basic scrapbooking features with tools such as Spot Healing Brush for airbrushing, and artifact reduction algorithms for color editing, lighting adjustment, improving skin tones, reduce blur and jagged edges, cropping, and red-eye removal. Photomerge, Recompose, and People Recognition are some cool tools that can be used for tagging faces, resize visual elements, scaling, and blending two or more photos. Elements Organizer can import images from digital cameras, flash drives, scanners, screen captures, camera phones, and still frames from videos into MyPictures folder while providing quick and convenient anywhere access, online backup, and sharing via Facebook, email, or personal web pages. Adobe Flash allows viewers to quickly showcase photos and video clips with animated templates, completing your photo editing experience.
A complete photo editing solution from Corel includes the PaintShop Pro X3, CorelDRAW, and Painter 11 for $59.99. Corel has added new tools to these suites such as Vibrancy, Express Lab, Smart Carver, Object Extractor, Makeover Tools, and On-Image Text Editing. The Smart Photo allows brightness adjustment with Clarify Tool, saturation, focus, black-and-white level adjustment and removing unwanted pixels with One Step Noise Removal. Change the cool and warm tones with Color Balance editor. Analyze images with Dodge and Burn tools, and extract line art, blurriness, crispness with High Pass Sharpen. Let your inner Andy Warhol shine through with Go Retro, Picture Tubes, and more tools offered with each package solution provided by Corel.
For The MAC
While these solutions can efficiently manage resources on most Windows based PCs, for MAC solutions, Apple ArtStudio is the photo editing app for iPhones ($0.99) and iPads ($4.99). Create beautiful paintings from a photo and improve digital quality through DODGE/BURN smudge removal, antialiasing, line smoothing, and brush pressure styling with over 30 brushes such as pencils, wet brush, eraser, smudge tool, bucket fill, airbrush, and more. Finally, load/save/export to the iPhone gallery, from online gallery, or send by email for quick and convenient sharing. Most of these suites will support RAW formats, HD Videos, DSLR cameras, and over 74 output formats such as GIF, JPEG, JPEG 2000, PNG, TIFF, and BMP (as well as their Windows counterparts such as Microsoft Picture Manager or Paint ).
Online Album Sharing
For creating custom album art projects like photo books, calendars, greeting cards, slide shows, and clip art, there are free online sources such as Shutterfly, Picasa v 3.8.0, Flickr (with 300 MB photo limit), and Sharpcast/SugarSync. Create photo libraries, tag your friends, create desktop backgrounds, screensavers, posters, collages, movies, burn CDs, thumbnails and more. Then sync to web and send invitations to your friends to view the album from your Google account from Picasa, yahoo account from Flickr, or your Shutterfly account. Create photo archives with over 500 MB online space from SugarSync (which was formerly Sharpcast Photos – which had merged with Yahoo! Photos). Upload photos using the standard Adobe Flash uploader (Flickr and Shutterfly offer apps to upload from desktop, mobile devices or non-standard browsers). Just shoot, upload, and share.
I have used Flickr, Picasa, and SugarSync to create photo albums and found that they differ by storage space, compression, and image resolution for their pro and regular memberships. Most web albums allow control of album viewing and download through various access control settings on each album. Through Flickr, Picasa, or Shutterfly you can email your Facebook friends, send live feed by commenting on a photo, and tag your favorites. Once uploaded, professional photographers can sell their photos by creating galleries and layouts. With online albums, check automatic copyrights to your photos, as well as who can leave comments, download, purchase, or change the views on a particular photo that has its own URL. Create a moving photo experience with slide shows, embedding into html, batch organizing, or arranging into clips right through a web album.
Thanks to these software technologies, anywhere access is now made possible with your own personal cloud space allowing remote photo backup, photo syncing, and photo sharing with different apps or devices. Treasure memories and let your creative side come out by creating a photo album using any one of the above products for the photographer in you!
