Miscellaneous Reviews 2003-2004

By Allan Jackson

Microsoft Photo Premium 10

The digital revolution in photography is underway with a vengeance and there are going lots of people who unwrap shiny new digital cameras this Christmas.
The creative opportunities in digital photography are enormous and the costs are so minimal that you can carry on taking pictures until you get exactly what you want. Digital cameras don't take perfect pictures every time, like their film cousins, but you can adjust them so that they're exactly right before you print them out or take them to the lab.
The tools you will use to enhance your digital pictures include a computer and a software package designed for the purpose. The computer also comes in handy for storing pictures that you've taken so as to make room in your camera's memory for more.
The sort of computer that is needed depends very much on the size of the pictures you want to manipulate and enhance. Most computers sold in the last few years will be able to handle digital snapshots but you'll need a more substantial machine to cope with the high-resolution pictures which today's top-of-the-range cameras can produce.
There are many different software packages available ranging from simple programs for viewing pictures on your computer to extremely sophisticated packages which can manipulate images in every conceivable way. Most cameras come with some sort of software but much of it is pretty basic, which is why there are so many additional programs on the market.
One of these, which recently came my way, is Microsoft Photo Premium 10 which consists of a program for editing pictures and a library program for downloading them onto your computer and organising them once you've done that. You start by plugging your camera or memory card into the computer and hitting the Import button in the library program.
It copies the pictures onto your computer where you can view them and enter keywords, a rating, or task which needs to be done to each. You would later be able to get Photo Premium to show you all your pictures of cats, for example, all the pictures which you've rated as five star, or all the ones needing to touched-up.
Fixing a picture is as simple as selecting the one you want and hitting the Edit button. This launches the Photo Premium editor which gives you a one-click access to various tasks such as correcting the exposure and colour, cropping off bits of the picture you don't want, applying a sepia tint or fixing redeye.
You can put a frame around your pictures, paint on them, add lines, shapes or text to them, and use them in a number of print projects such as calendars, greetings cards or album pages. There is bags of opportunity to be creative and, once you're happy, Photo Premium 10 makes it easy to print out your masterpiece or e-mail it to friends and family.
And that is just about all there is to the program except for the ability to make selections of areas of a picture for use in other pictures and the ability to apply a transparent effect to picture layers so that the underneath layer become visible. The package does not include any clone stamp or other tools to do photo restoration but, then, it is designed to be as simple as possible.
I liked Photo Premium 10 because of its simplicity and the fact it demands a minimum of computer knowledge from its users. I feel that that it could be a good choice for people who want to be able to do elementary picture correction but little else. The only thing the package is really missing, to my mind, is a button which you could press to copy selected images to a disc for archival purposes or to take them to a lab for printing.
In spite of its name which includes the word 'Premium', the package is Microsoft's entry-level offering for digital photographers. In the next few weeks I'm hoping to review Digital Photo Suite which is Premium's big brother and loaded with features which make it sound ideal for users with more of an interest in photo manipulation.

Cool Free Software

I have found a really nice little free program which could be very useful for all you digiteers. It's called Neat Image and its sole purpose is to remove noise from digital images. The basic version is totally free and, at under 1,5Mb, very quick to download. I have tested it a couple of times and the results are incredible although you can probably get even better results after a careful read of the downloadable manual and some practice.
The only drawback to the free version that I can see, is that it is a standalone program into which you have to bring your image before it can do its magic. You need to make all the adjustments [excluding sharpening] to the image in your usual image manipulation program and then save it. The last step will be to open Neat Image and process and sharpen the image.
There are paid versions of the program which include a plugin which will work from within any image editor which is compliant with the Photoshop plugin standard. The benfits of this is that you don't have to process the entire picture but can confine your attentions to selected areas or colour channels.
Neat Image and its manual can be downloaded from http://www.neatimage.com.

Microsoft Encarta 2005 Premium Suite

Microsoft Encarta is one of my favourite pieces of software and I was very pleased when the 2005 Premium Suite arrived at my office a while ago.
The version of Encarta I received comes on four CD-ROM discs but, fortunately, you can install the whole thing on your hard drive so that you don't have to keep swapping between discs. Encarta is wonderful melange of encyclopaedia, world atlas, list of quotations, English dictionary, bilingual dictionaries in a number of languages, a thesaurus, guides to famous works of literature, an archive of articles from Times newspaper and a version of itself for younger children.
The product includes over 130000 entries, 25000 pictures and illustrations and various other bits and pieces including sounds and video. In addition to all this, Encarta is very tightly integrated with the Internet and makes it very easy to find more information about any topic.
Encarta provides access to a huge number of websites which have been vetted by Encarta Editors and, if you can't find the information you're looking for, you can perform a general web search. One of the coolest things about Encarta is the Researcher tool which you can use to capture information from Encarta and the Internet and then output all your gleanings into a nice MS Word document or web page which you can edit. Any moderately savvy kid could use Encarta, the Internet and Researcher to compile his or her project in fractions of the time that it took us in our day.
Some may say that that is no good and that the kids will never the learn the research skills we previous generations had to employ. The short answer to which is that we only went delving in dusty libraries because we didn't have Encarta and because the Internet hadn't been invented yet.
I loved Encarta but I found it astonishingly difficult to write this article because I kept getting distracted by it and plunging off to browse for interesting things. In very short order I had read an extract from Dickens' A Christmas Carol, all about Frank Whittle, the inventor of jet engines, and a literature guide to Slaughter House-Five.
I also read a bit out of Samuel Pepys' diary for 4 December 1661 in which he said that, on his way to town, he "saw a man lie dead upon Westminster Stairs that had been drowned yesterday". And on that note, I see that there's article on our very own Chester Williams which I must read.
Microsoft Encarta 2005 Premium Suite will cost you something over R500 and a bit more than than for the DVD editions.

Google Desktop Search

Finding the computer files you want was never easy, even in the days before we had hard drives in our computers, because we still had to look through a major stack of floppy discs before we could find that obscure file we needed.
The problem of tracing files has got even worse lately with hard drives smaller than 40Gb becoming increasingly rare. Windows has had a search feature for quite some time but, although better than nothing, it was ponderous and slow, especially when it came to searching within files for a particular bit of text.
Over the years there have been a number of attempts to come up with a better solution and I ended up using one which would go and index the contents of your hard drive including the contents of certain files such as Microsoft Word documents. It improved things but it was also a bit clumsy and I welcomed Google's recent announcement that they had developed a program of their own which you could download and which would act like a search engine on your computer.
The 400kb file downloaded over my dreadful dial-up connection in a couple of minutes and set about the task of indexing all my existing files in periods when I wasn't using my computer. The program can index Microsoft Office files, Outlook and Outlook Express mail messages and web pages you've viewed.
Indexing doesn't take more than a few hours and, as you generate new documents or receive new mail messages, they are automatically added to the index as well.
You access the program from an icon in your system tray which brings up a page looking very much like the ordinary Google search page but which says Google Desktop Search. You type in a word or phrase that you're looking for and it generates a list of all the documents on your computer in which it appears.
The program is still officially in its Beta, or test, phase but I think it's brilliant and have already begun to wonder how I ever did without it in the past. It worked pretty fast on my previous Celeron 500 machine and now is now even faster on my brand new, and vastly superior, Canopus.
The only potential drawback to the program is that it might catch you out and remember things that you'd just as soon were forgotten, such as that visit to Sabrina the teen porn queen's home page. You may one day be able to set Google Desktop Search to forget some of the places you've been and things you've seen but, in the meantime, it would be best to be careful.
You can download Google Desktop Search at http://desktop.google.com/. Please note that it is currently available only in English for computers running Windows 2000 (with Service Pack 3) and Windows XP. Google say that they will be adding to the list of files it is able to index and bringing it out in other languages. They announced, as I was writing this, that there would definitely be a version of the program for Macintosh computers.

Works Suite 2004

The latest arrival on my computer is Microsoft Works Suite 2004 which consists of Encarta 2004, Money 2004, Word 2002, PictureIt! Photo Standard and, lastly, Works itself.
Works consists among other things of a database, spreadsheet and calendar programs which are cut down versions of the programs you'll find in the far more expensive Microsoft Office. The Works programs will be more than enough for most home or small office user's needs and you do get Word 2002 which is about as good as wordprocessors get.
There are people who use personal finance packages and there are those like me who rather be stretched on a rack but, if you're the type who falls into the first category, you're probably going to love Money. I've never managed to use a computer-based calendar but I must say that the one in Works looks simple and apparently will synchronise with Palm or Pocket PC digital assistants. I reckon I'll give it a try although I'm a bit disappointed that it doesn't have a to do list feature
PictureIt! Photo Standard is a very nice little program which can be used to do things with digital images including simple manipulation like colour and contrast correction, cropping, blurring and sharpening, and red eye removal. It also makes it easy to e-mail your pictures or print them out in a variety of sizes or with more than one picture per page.
Photo Standard also makes it easy to complete projects such as greetings cards and calendars using your pictures. I think the program could be very useful to people who just want to do a few things with their images but enthusiasts may possibly want to upgrade to the PictureIt! Digital Image Suite.
Encarta is one of my favourite pieces of software of all time and I've reviewed it often enough that I've run out of superlatives. Suffice it to say that I'm sure you'll find it interesting and informative and a positive boon if you have kids who get homework. After fiddling with Encarta for a while I wouldn't be surprised if you later decide to upgrade to the full reference suite.
All in all MS Works Suite is quite bargain bearing in mind the number of different programs that you get even though not everyone will use all of them. You do get a legal version Word which is nearly worth the whole suite price by itself and you also qualify to buy MS-Office at the upgrade price if you should ever need it.

ACDSee & Foto slate

One of the biggest problems with digital images is that there get to be so darn many of them that it becomes really hard to view them or find the one you need in a hurry.
In order to find that precious picture of your Auntie Millie which you know you took, for example, you'll probably end up spending hours looking through all the cryptically named pictures on your hard drive and even then you might not find it in time for use in the pew leaflet at her funeral.
Some time ago I bought a new scanner and got a program called ACDSee for viewing and organizing images with it. I fiddled with it for quite a while a found it a very good tool to use for navigating through and viewing masses of images.
I recently decided that I wanted the newest version which has all sorts of extras which make it easy to catalogue and find images. After squeezing my credit card a bit, I spent an evening downloading ACDSee 5.0 together with a free copy of Fotoslate 3.0 from www.acdsystems.com.
The new version of the program was great but, before I could turn round, Version 6 of was released and I was given a free upgrade to it after a bit of a brawl. Version 6 of ACDSee was definitely not an improvement being both slower and generally more cra*py than the previous one. Since then, then, however, there have been two service releases which have improved V6 enormously.
What you can do, as you store pictures on your computer, is select an image or any group of them and put them in a category, such as pets or people, which makes it easier to search for whatever you want. The program will also allow you to enter a description and keywords for each picture or group of pictures. The cataloguing feature is very handy and worked like a dream during a fairly intense period last year when I was taking hundreds of pictures and needed to know exactly what each was.
The only worrying thing about the system is the database in which ACDSee stores the information about each picture. It is a digital file, of course, and is therefore just as liable to become corrupted, accidentally deleted or overwritten, as any other file. I recently had a serious incident with Windows during which I had to re-install my all my software and ACDSee, not being bright enough to tell that I already had a large database, overwrote it with a new empty one. ACDSee wasn't the only stupid one on that occasion, however, because I hadn't backed-up my database.
If you go the digital photo route you have to do your backups religiously. I say again, you have to do your backups religiously
One of the companion programs to ACDSee which has turned out to be a little gem is FotoSlate. It can be used to produce album pages of your pictures or print layouts so that you can get the maximum use out of your expensive photographic paper. You can print multiple copies of an image or a number of different ones on the same sheet of paper. The program is potentially very useful if you do a lot of home printing and is intelligent enough to try to increase the size of pictures that would not print well because they are too small.

Foto Slate

It seems that there an awful lot of people going the digital photography route at the moment and with good reason.
A decent digital camera will give you prints that you can't tell apart from those produced by a film camera and you have the benefit that your pictures are in a format that your computer can understand.
You then have the opportunity of fiddling to your heart's content e-mailing your pictures around the world, manipulating them if you want, and using them to make greetings cards or whatever.
The possession of a digital camera does mean, however, that you're faced with the problem of storing and indexing all your pictures and also with the high price of ink cartridges and photo paper for your inkjet.
I'll get to the storage question on another occasion but in the meantime I've found a little program which makes printing digital pictures a breeze. The program is produced by ACD Systems (www.acdsystems.com) and is called FotoSlate.
It can be used to produce album pages of your pictures or print layouts so that you can get the maximum use out of your expensive photographic paper. You can print multiple copies of an image or a number of different ones on the same sheet of paper.
FotoSlate is potentially very useful but it does print the images that you give it without analysing whether the image will print well at the size you want it to. It also crops part of the image when printing if the proportions are different to the print size chosen. You'll be OK if your images are correct proportionally and are large enough to print at the size you need.
And while we're talking about digital imagery, take my advice and don't touch a digital SLR camera unless you positively intend to buy it. I speak from the bitter experience of having played with Canon's new D-10 camera last weekend and fallen hopelessly in love with all R25000's worth of it.

Canon EOS 300D

Here's some exciting news that I've been waiting a long time for; a digital SLR camera that sounds as it is going to pretty affordable.
I did crack eighteen months ago and get a compact digital camera and I have had a fair bit of fun with it but it just wasn't any competition for my normal film cameras. I yearned for a digital camera body that I could use with my existing lenses and which wouldn't cost me an arm and a leg.
Canon recently announced the imminent launch of the 6,3 megapixel Canon EOS 300D camera at $899, body only, and at $999 with an 18-55mm lens which is roughly equivalent to a 28-80mm lens in 35mm camera terms. The launch of the 300D is generating a lot of excitement around the Internet and it has received a Highly Recommended from Digital Photography Review (www.dpreview.com) which is one of the most respected digital photography websites around.
It has also been described as unbelievably good value for money which I can well believe because it offers all the speed and features of a fully-fledged SLR at the price of a good point-and-shoot digital. I expect that other manufacturers are going to have to re-evaluate their pricing strategies in the light of this, and about bloody time say I.
The 300D's big brother is the 10D which retails for $1499 in the USA but costs close to R25000 here so I don't for a single minute imagine that the 300D is going to appear locally at anything like the prices quoted above. I'd prefer to buy locally but I won't pay through the nose for the privilege and I won't hesitate to order through a reputable overseas dealer if that's the difference between affording the camera or not.
***
And another interesting little titbit which is that Sentech is now offering Internet bandwidth via bi-directional satellite connection direct to the Internet backbone in the UK. The current packages are aimed at corporates and are too pricy for home users but an informant at Sentech tells me that they'll be launching Internet connection packages in November for smaller users using radio technology. Now wouldn't that be a great Christmas present?

Works Suite 2004

The latest arrival on my computer is Microsoft Works Suite 2004 which consists of Encarta 2004, Money 2004, Word 2002, PictureIt! Photo Standard and, lastly, Works itself.
Works consists among other things of a database, spreadsheet and calendar programs which are cut down versions of the programs you'll find in the far more expensive Microsoft Office. The Works programs will be more than enough for most home or small office user's needs and you do get Word 2002 which is about as good as wordprocessors get.
There are people who use personal finance packages and there are those like me who rather be stretched on a rack but, if you're the type who falls into the first category, you're probably going to love Money. I've never managed to use a computer-based calendar but I must say that the one in Works looks simple and apparently will synchronise with Palm or Pocket PC digital assistants. I reckon I'll give it a try although I'm a bit disappointed that it doesn't have a to do list feature
PictureIt! Photo Standard is a very nice little program which can be used to do things with digital images including simple manipulation like colour and contrast correction, cropping, blurring and sharpening, and red eye removal. It also makes it easy to e-mail your pictures or print them out in a variety of sizes or with more than one picture per page.
Photo Standard also makes it easy to complete projects such as greetings cards and calendars using your pictures. I think the program could be very useful to people who just want to do a few things with their images but enthusiasts may possibly want to upgrade to the PictureIt! Digital Image Suite.
Encarta is one of my favourite pieces of software of all time and I've reviewed it often enough that I've run out of superlatives. Suffice it to say that I'm sure you'll find it interesting and informative and a positive boon if you have kids who get homework. After fiddling with Encarta for a while I wouldn't be surprised if you later decide to upgrade to the full reference suite.
All in all MS Works Suite is quite bargain bearing in mind the number of different programs that you get even though not everyone will use all of them. You do get a legal version Word which is nearly worth the whole suite price by itself and you also qualify to buy MS-Office at the upgrade price if you should ever need it.