Customer Reviews

Photo Album 7 Deluxe

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(32)
3 star:		(21)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I had little photo editing experience when I used "Corel Photo Album 7 Deluxe". I found this software suite to be an excellent digital photo editing tool for basic users. It allows novice users to perform complex or seemingly impossible editing tasks with little more than intuition and this tool. It is not a resource designed for the advanced user or photographer who needs more sensitive and professional tools.

It allows the user to easily organize, sort, edit, share, retouch, and, in general, explore creatively with your digital photo file. It guides the user in linking music with slide shows and video presentations, including song selection and music synchronization.

This suite is simple and intuitve for any user in my estimation. It loads easily and its features can be addressed through drag and drop icons in a fairly user friendly manner. I found the retouching tools to be the most useful as well as the most fun element for me in my explorations. All the standard retouching tools are available including erasing blemishes, whitening teeth, eliminating red eye, and even a painting on a suntan tool.

The intuitive interface allows easy organiztion of your photos from sort, find, search by various identifiers (name, text, date, etc.)to editing and sending. There are a large number of project templates (calendars, scrapbooks, collages, etc.) that I did not explore. Lastly, the working with videos section seems equally simple and self-explanatory but I have not done any video editing yet.

All in all, many of the features of "Corel Photo Album 7 Deluxe" can be found in freeware or among resident tools on some computers. But this software suite has combined a large number of useful digital photo and video editing tools into one simple user friendly package. Believe me when I say I enjoyed several hours exploring many of its features and I am definitely a novice at photo editing. I recommend this product for what it does and how it does it.

The Corel Photo Album 7 Deluxe program was a snap to load in my VISTA computer. It is one of very few software programs that have a good hardcopy instruction book in the box. I was pleased to find it unnecessary to download a copy of the manual from the install disk or a Corel Web site.

I worked with this software long enough to determine two things: It does a great job of organizing my photos and performing some elemental editing--red eye removal, cropping, adjusting color and etc. It will even whiten teeth and put a suntan on pale people. The next thing I discovered was how limited the program was. It has little (nothing) more than a basic capability to edit digital photos. The basic photo editing programs that come bundled with the Microsoft VISTA operating system do almost as much.

In other words, I thought the Photo Album 7 Deluxe program was good at doing rudimentary editing things that could be done in other ways for a lot less money. Now, having said that:

I started searching Amazon.com to find a photo editing program that would do more. I found and purchased Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate, a complete photo editing program that contains everything the Corel Photo Album 7 Deluxe program does, but a whole lot more and it is only about ten bucks more expensive.

My review is saying two things: (1) The Photo Album 7 Deluxe program is a good one, but (2) it fills a need that hardly exists.

First I'd like to say I am a long time user of Photo Album, back when it was developed by Jasc, before Corel bought it out.
I am amazed how many people have given this product thumbs up. Apparently they have not used the previous version Photo Album 6. Yes there are a few improvements like the nice playback feature of movie clips. However there are so many critical features that were eliminated in this new version 7, I can hardly give it a rating of one star.
First off, the new layout is horrid compared to Photo Album 6. The large user friendly icons and tabs for main controls were eliminated. In its place Corel decided to incorporate the main screen tabs into the left tree menu. By comparison this is more frustrating and time consuming to negotiate. It was easy to know what I was doing in Photo Album 6, not so in 7. Secondly, batch commands like renaming all photos within a folder were overlooked. Try individually renaming 500 photos from a family vacation, unless you want to spend frustrating hours doing so. In version 6, it took a matter of seconds from a conveniently placed icon. There are countless other features that were either eliminated or added for no reason other than clutter the screen. Most importantly however, there is no way to reorganize the order of photos within a folder. Go ahead and try to drag and drop an image to a new location. Corel broke this feature too, which worked just fine in version 6.
If you are like me, I didn't expect this program to professionally edit photos. There are other programs to do that, like the one Corel advertizes permanently on Photo Album, which hogs prime real estate on your screen. BTW, there used to be a feature of adding hyperlinks to other photo editing programs, now eliminated by Corel. No, Photo Album was intended to load, name and rearrange photos in an organized and efficient way to save them on your computer for easy access.
In this regards, Photo Album 6 blows this newer version all to pieces. What was Corel thinking? Did they hire part time college students to develop this product without quality review? I contacted Corel about these issues and all I got was a pleasant reply stating this is a completely redesigned version, with no information about fixing it. And I haven't even mentioned all the features broken on version 7. So for now I deleted this program and rolled back to version 6. Save your money and buy Photo Album 6. You'll be glad you did.

Photo Album 7 is a nice little program for those who lack the time and/or desire to edit photos idividually. It is great if you do not want to spend hundreds of dollars on either the CorelDraw suite or one of the many versions of Adobe CS3.I am a former user of the CorelDraw suite who has coverted (reluctantly) to the Adobe suite of products. So you might want to take my criticisms with a grain of salt.

Photo Album is one of those pieces of software that I call 80% software. What I mean by that is Corel has scaled down the complexity of their PhotoPaint software to fit the needs of about 80% of the general users. Like many software publishers Corel realized the majority of users did not want a full photo editing suite. The basic user wants to be able to have one step fixes to exposure, be able to crop, and then do some cutesy tricks with their photos. For that Photo Album is great.

The first time I opened Photo Album the software immediate started to index all my photos. Since I have over 25000 images in my My Documents folder this took quite some time. I was not to thrilled with the way Photo Album organizes the photos. One of the things it does is to place thumbnails of all the images in a strip at the bottom of the program. When dealing with a large number of photos it becomes difficult to search through them.

After the indexing was finished, I selected a few photos I had from a recent trip to the beach. I selected these photos specifically because I had already edited them in PhotoShop and printed them. I took original unedited versions of these photos and ran them through Photo Album. I first used the "Quick Fix" feature to see how they would be altered. Whilr the Quick Fix feature did deepen some of the washed out colors, I did find that it did not seem to do as good of a job as Adobe CS3. Overall though it was fine and Photo Album allows you to make some adjustments to saturation and darkness as well as some other basic levels (but nowhere near the control as the expensive suite give you).

I did find the randomize button a little goofy within the Quick Fix. Basically the randomize button is suppose to shuffle the sliders for the colors, hue, saturation, etc. and show you what the photo would look like. I guess this is a fun way to see how the different levels affect your photos.

The makeover tools are preset tools that will help portraits look better. The Blemish tool will place a skin tone dab of color over an area (presumably a skin defect like pimples or wrinkles) with a blemish. The toothbrush can be used to whiten areas and is not restricted to just teeth. The suntan will darken an area to give it a deeper tone. From a cursory test run these tools did function decently.

Photo Album also comes with some fun things that Corel hopes will entice you to buy this program. Picture tubes is a way to place a repeating GIF image on top of your photo. You can add from a host of GIFs already in Photo Album such as flames, flower, butterflies. This can be a liitle goofy, but can also serve the purpose of hiding unwanted areas of the photo.

You also have the ability to create greeting cards scrapbooks and calendars (plus more) from preset templates. If this is something you would want to do, then this feature alone may make this program worth while. I don't do any photo printing from home, I use one of the online companies for printing (it tends to be cheaper and better quality). I have the ability to create bound picture books and calendar that look like they were done professionally, so for me this would not be a feature I would use.

Overall, for this price I don't think any beginning photo bug could go wrong buying this. There are enough basic feature to keep you entertained and it is by no means overwhekming to learn. In fact, most people will probably not even need to open the manual.

I bought Photo Album 7 Deluxe as an upgrade from Photo Album 6. I had thousands of photos organized into collections and expected this information to load in Photo Album 7. No such luck. There is no collections feature. Apparently, "tags" is a replacement, but there is no apparent way to bring one's collections into the new program. This would mean "re-tagging" thousands of photos. I tried contacting support and was told there was a $25 charge for answering a question. This is uselss and insulting to the customer. I will try to return the program. Don't buy this item if you plan on importing a previous version's data.

I received this product today and loaded it with amazing ease. After playing around with it and making different projects I find this to be a great beginners photo editing program for those that are just starting out with a digital camera. It really makes some great scrapbook pages and you can add all kinds of frames, graphics and such to your project. I love the Magazine photo page. It is so cute putting the kids pictures up there and jazzing them up.
I do also own Adobe Photo Elements and a Kodak program and have to say that this Corel's program is so much better. I like the Kodak one but it doesn't come with all the little do dad's that this one does and Adobe's program is just too far advanced for the average user. If you are considering one program to buy for editing photos I would pick this one hands down. Reasonable price, ease of use and so many different projects will delight everyone in the household.

I have to admit I've used this product for five minutes, but it doesn't appear to have the same features as Photo Album 4 or 6. This looks to be perfectly adequate software if you're starting from scratch with your photo collection, but if you expect it to be an "upgrade" from an earlier version of Photo Album you may be disappointed.

The earlier versions created an Access database of the photos, that you could export and have as a record of the photo file names, captions, keywords, etc. Very useful when transferring large quantities of photos (not in slideshows) to someone else who didn't have Photo Album. While that wasn't an advertised function of the package it was nice, and appears to be missing from this software.

The use of keywords for photos has been changed to using tags. Instead of being able to assign photos to keywords by clicking on the applicable keywords in a list, you now have to either retype the tags for each group of photos, or drag each group of photos to each tag.

I've written to Corel support to see if I just can't find these features, so if I do find they exist I'll edit this review.

I got this product for my mother-in-law. She is between a beginner and intermediate computer user. She previously used an older version of Photoshop Elements 2. I watched to assist her, but my help was unneeded.

-Install: she was able to easily install the product.
-Find pictures: the program placed all pictures on her computer in a sidebar window that she was then easily able to navigate. It did not rename the folders or files, but left them as they are on her computer.
-Slideshow: she was able to play a slideshow, after figuring out that she had to put pictures into a tray, located beneath the pictures she wanted to see on the slideshow. It worked well.
-Rotate: She was able to rotate a photo and save the rotated version to the hard drive. We were pleasantly surprised to find that Corel Photo Album 7 Deluxe added (2) to the file name thereby leaving the original photo intact and saving the new filename to [filename](2).jpeg. This is important to protect beginners who are not familiar with lossy.
- Other features: She said the other features looked easy to use and would try them when she got home. If she finds any of them difficult to use or ineffective, I will edit this review to include her additional thoughts.

She says this program is familiar to her as the features/menus are like her old version of Photoshop Elements 2. She found them easy to find, understand, and use.

The requirements to use the software:

Windows Vista, XP, 1 GHz or faster, 500 MB hard drive space, 1024 x 768 24 bit color, Microsoft DirectX 9, QuickTime 7, CD ROM drive, mouse, Outlook Express.

I would recommend this software to anyone that is a beginner, intermediate computer user, or anyone that wants easy to use software.

I've been a Picasa (free) user for some time now, and like its interface and speed. Will this Corel Photo Album Deluxe 7 replace it for me? I don't know...they are really very similar, but you pay around $40 for one.

I've used Microsoft PictureIt for years and enjoyed all its bells and whistles, but found it to be a bit slow and a resource hog. PhotoShop is a bit complicated for my likes. Corel is certainly a solid third option.

Pros: quick editing, features work as promised, simple interface that is user friendly for novices.

Cons: works best with all other programs closed, nothing really 'deluxe' about it over and above other similar programs...some of which are free.

"Easy to use"...yes.
"Powerful editing..."...sort of.
"Amazing themes..."...nothing the others don't offer.
"Back up your photos online..."...and pay to do it after 30 days.

If you are a brand loyalist or just need a simple photo editor with solid specs, this would be for you. If you already have Photoshop, PictureIt or Picasa...don't waste your money on redundant software.

I have used Paint Shop Pro and Photo Album for a long time and one of the valuable features to me was the ability to do organization in Photo Album, then open photos via the jump or launch function to PSP. In Photo Album 7 that ability is removed which makes it virtually worthless to me. Both products seem to have lost customer value since being purchased from Jasc by Corel, proof that bigger is not necessarily better. I am sticking to Photo Album 5, they have lost a loyal upgrader.