Customer Reviews

Adobe PhotoDeluxe Home Edition 4.0 [Old Version]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

Let me begin by saying that I've only been using Photo Deluxe for a couple weeks, but I'm probably being generous with the 4-star rating. The fourth star was mainly for the free web-posting capability and Adobe's reputation. As general use goes, I guess I'd have to give it a three. First off, as with prior versions, the step-by-step progression through everything makes me crazy! I had hoped that Adobe would have abandoned this for the new version. I'm not wild about having to go through all the proceeding steps to get to the one I want. Also, I don't care for the way this program sets up printing, and don't make more than one mistake without saving because there's only one level of undo, so if you really screw up, you have to start over from the beginning or your last save point. And then when you want to "save as" you get to choose the Adobe PDD format...period, unless you save for e-mail or the web then you get to choose JPEG and a couple others. But try to open an Adobe PDD format in another editing program and you'll more than likely find that you can't do it. In it's favor, there's a lot of neat tools here and it's fairly easy to use. There's lots of "cute" stuff like the clip art and the seasonal add-ons that the program automatically notifies you of so you can put the CD in and load it if you're into that sort of stuff. I've spent an enormous amount of time experimenting with different editing programs over the last few months looking for a decent one under $100 just for general purpose use. I do photography professionally and I use Photoshop 5.5, but that's another league. This is all opinion, but for ease of use, Microsoft Picture It gets my vote especially when it's used along with Microsoft Home Publisher 2000. But for about twenty bucks more than Photo Deluxe 4.0 there's Ulead Photo Impact 5.0. This is a great program! There's up to 99 levels of undo and great tools and palletts. I use this one extensively. And the really good web tools are on Photo Suite III. As for Photo Deluxe 4.0, it's an ok program, but if you're just beginning to get into digital imaging, I believe Picture It is the better bet, and if you want more for not much more, go with Photo Impact 5.0. All in all, I'm really dissappointed in Photo Deluxe 4.0.

I am a long time user of Adobe Photo Deluxe(versions 2.9 and 3.0) and think their image editing capability is good. I bought 4.0 for its advertised photo organization. I couldn't believe that it was the same archaic difficult system...My Photos and the archaic .PDD extension on pictures. I couldn't even download my digital camera into the program....it would only do one image at a time painfully slow. I bought this new program hoping to eliminate my need to work with 3 different programs as I currently do. Dreamer. I called Adobe to see if I could return the product to them. The phone rep was rude and totally uninterested in my concerns. I'm stuck with a lemon.

This software came with my digital camera. ... One of the key aspects of digital photography is that it is probably the best way to preserve and easily distribute photo collections to posterity. Adobe's oddball proprietary format nullifies this. It produces large files that stand a more than even chance of being unreadable by software 10+ years down the road. Exporting to a .jpg does appear to recompress the image and strip off non-viewable information text that some programs (and cameras) append to the file that better describe the photo. I'll stick with any other photo editing software that uses native .jpg files. There are several better choices with just as many tools. Try Photosuite 4 with a rebate for example (almost free).

Adobe's PhotoDeluxe Home Edition 4.0, an entry level, consumer-oriented image editor, includes many of the great color-correcting and painting tools common to its professional software package, Photoshop 5.X. Though easier to learn and use than Photoshop, PhotoDeluxe 4.0 contains some features that are not quickly accessible or understandable to novice users, and that's where a class series, such as given regularly by Leisure World PC Users Group comes in handy. Also, Adobe PhotoDeluxe 4.0 for Dummies by Julie Adair King is a fun and easy guide to photo retouching and cool digital effects.

The Adobe PhotoDeluxe 4.0 interface makes it easy to handle the basics of editing pixel-based images, and saving and printing files. A wide variety of image-editing tools are available in the program that allow you to manipulate the brightness and contrast controls, color options and picture/canvas size. There are also commands for adding borders and shadows; fixing red-eye syndrome; changing an image's focus; and removing dust, noise, and patterns. Both guided activities and the advanced menu can be used for accessing painting, layers, and type tools; adjusting color, and working through special projects such as creating wallpaper and sending images via e-mail. The Help files cover all aspect of the Adobe PhotoDeluxe program including fun effects, troubleshooting problems, shortcuts, and online resources.

...Photo Deluxe saves to a number of other picture formats including jpg and bmp. To do this you go to the File Menu and select Export then File Format.. The .PDD file format is the uncompresssed native file format of Photo Deluxe, very much like the .CMX file format of Microsoft's Photo Draw. Unlike the other Finished Formats (jpg, bmp, tiff, etc.), which flatten out your work into one solid layer and loose detail along the way, these special native formats allow programs like Photo Deluxe to store your work without loosing any detail - all layers and inserted components or objects are maintained separately in the digital realm without any degredation. This is perfect for future editing!

...Photo Deluxe's Photo Size and Canvas Size functions, which perfectly calibrate the optimun display, printing and saving sizes of your work...

Photo Deluxe is probably the most formidable Photo Editor in its range - bundled free with digital cameras and scanners or [for a good price]. My only gripe is that over the years I have been hoping that the program's features and sophistication grow with my level of skill and curiosity. But then that's a bit selfish of me because others would not get the opportunuty to experience the well balanced introduction to Photo Editing that Photo Deluxe gives. I guess that I need to upgrade to its bigger brothers, Photo Shop LE or the full blown Photo Shop. No, the last time I checked the move was too big a jump and plus, Photo Deluxe is still serving my need just fine.

As a grade school kid who happens to have a knack for computers, I've always been interested in graphics of all sorts. I'm very glad I purchased photodeluxe. While it's definetly not the best of Adobe's products, its good for beginners and allows quite a bit of flexibility. I had no problems operating it and I found it was actually a valuable asset to my web page. The best part is that you can fix photos that have poor lighting and adjust the contrast and color balance. You can add special effects to your photos as well as changing the background, creating cards and calendars, and exporting them into different formats. I would recommend this product for anyone who just wants to make photos look better and make the most of their graphics. Simply put, Adobe is probably the best when it comes to graphics, but Photodeluxe can only go so far. Anyway, it's good enough for me!

The program stores pictures in a proprietary format (*.pdd). It can take JPEG (and many other file formats) as input, but then saves in the photodeluxe format, which was 20X larger than JPEG format. Also this makes sharing pictures harder and uploading to a website harder. There was an export option to JPEG but I believe this was recompressing the picture, which can not be good for image quality.

Also could not change where the program wanted to store pictures. I want to put pictures in a subfolder under my documents so I can do easier backups. But Photodeluxe doesn't have an option (that I could find) for using a directory other than the default of the program directory.

Finally, the tools provided get to be a little tedious. The steps you have to go through for using a tool (e.g. redeye removal) are on several tabs of a dialog, so you have many extra clicks to get between tabs.

When downloading pictures it downloads them all to a open format in the program, then memory problem occurs, too many pictures open. I reloaded the 3.0 and it downloads them without opening them. I feel the earlier version was easier to use except for the .pdd issue as always.

run away, don't walk. i've nothing but problems w/ the prod. uses incredible amount of virtual memory/swap space. appear to have memory leak that causes it to get slower and slower over time in one session. always convert pic to its proprietary .pdd format. it's just pathetic. it's a shame Adobe makes this kind of crap. run away...

As with several other reviews of this product, my edition came bundled, in this case with a digital camera. I concur completely with the predominantly negative comments. I've used several other products for general image editing -- nothing fancy -- but this was probably the worst I've seen. I installed it, played with it for a couple of days, and quickly uninstalled it. It's non-intuitive, yet it forces you to follow a set procedure. And it saves in a humungous .pdd file format. In contrast, I just read a bunch of reviews about PhotoImpact 6.0 and immediately ordered it.