Customer Reviews

3D Album Picture Pro

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I bought this new version because I love the photo show made by the version 2.03, hoping there is a great enhancement in the new version. The product lives up to my expectation - show styles in the new version have improved a lot! Though not all styles favor my taste, it is my choice, and there are plenty of styles to choose from. Moreover, the Picture Pro edition let me change themes easily, for example, I can paint my own book covers and design pages for the 3D flipping book, and change the room and table settings.

One new feature I like particularly is the "My Albums" list. Now, I can keep a track of my built albums (I've built a lot!) and make any change of any album whenever I want to. I don't understand why there is a need to save, as one reviewer wrote. The album I built is the copy that saved from the preview. I can make the change of the copy using the same GUI controls I use during preview. There is no need to dig into the album files. Perhaps the reviewer is commenting on the version 2.03, which cannot be applied to this version.

I am an amateur photographer, and occasionally use Jasc Paint Shop to do some preliminary photo editing works. I didn't expect that 3D-Album Picture Pro come with a great photo editor, and did not even give it a try until the last weekend when I decide to create my own book cover. Holly cow, I can't believe that an album software come with such a powerful photo editor that is even better than my dedicated editing software. Jasc's tube brush is always my favorite but making my own tube is rather difficult. In Picture Pro, I simply create an image group and then drag and drop image into the group. I am very impressed by the Picture Pro's 3D layer styles and vector illustration tools.

I clicked the book cover image in the Photo Show page, choose the edit menu, and the software brings the book cover directly into the editor where I can put my own design. I can switch back and forth between the Photo Show page and the edit page until I get a happy result.

I bought the version 2.03 about one and half years ago. I remember there was a problem with my old HP laptop (not with my desktop) with S3 video card. The software will crash after running about 5 minutes. The support told me that the crash is due to the bug in the S3 video driver and upgrading the driver will solve this problem. But S3 video card was quite old and the support from HP was discontinued. I eventually got my new Dell Inspiron with GeForce FX. Both the old and new version now run smoothly without any problem. So, before buying the software, you should have a check of your computer. A decent 3D video card such as nVidia's GeForce or ATI's Radoen is the key, no matter how fast your CPU or how much memory your have.

I must truly applaud the staff on their extraordinary animation works. The variety and originality in various 3D effects is very apparent. Being the first timer to adopt the 3D technology in my business, I'd like to share my experience as a previously upset user but turned out to be a very pleased customer -- inadequate system resources or graphic card configurations (e.g., the cheep integrated video card) are the main reason that I have had continuous problems in performance and quality. Once this has been resolved, everything turns to be very smooth and great. Many evidences of this kind of change similar to my experience can be seen in the public community forum from the 3D-Album website.



Being only moderately knowledgeable on computers, the software does require some learning curve for me. It is not a wizard-driven program for beginners. After getting familiar with necessary terminology and concepts, I found the program to be quite easy to work with. More to the point, folks at support as well as in the community forum are very helpful. I've learned a lot from them and now quite knowledgeable in this area. Fewer software products today can provide such a great and dedicated support. Good results can be seen by many examples that users have posted in the community forum, ranging from novice to professional.

I've been trying all week to figure out how to get this program to put my show on a disk - any kind! It's been a totally frustrating effort; following all the cues both in the program and in the forums produced a show that I could only see on my computer that was about a 10th of the size of the recorded show and the graphics looked like I was using a Commodore 64 computer! I'm very disappointed with this software; upgrading from the Pro Platinum will cost $159; I'm hoping another program out there will show up that's more user friendly.

This product DOES NOT work with the new Windows Vista software. The manufacturer's support department did not at all respond to my e-mails.

I absolutly love the graphics in this software and it loads all the pictures in your album but it's hard to work for me. It takes time to figure out the ending frame when trying to make a dvd presentation. There's not a simple way to do it, if you are saving as a dvd movie to transferr to dvd you must sit in front of the computer and watch for a long time till you see the last picture and manually stop it there or it keeps recording or u can take the time and figure out how long all the songs total to and get a calculator and pick a number divide it by 15 then by 60 then by 2 and see if that number matches the length of all the songs. Very hard unless your a professional but its worth the time and the graphics and layouts are awesome. I'm still learning on this program and cant wait till i get the whole thing figured out.

I wanted to use an inexpensive program for things like wedding albums, my kids pictures and such. Intitially 3D Album was a little difficult to figure out, and seemed counter-intuitive. The most difficult part of 3D Album is working through the constant crashing in the middle of using 3D Album. It seems to crash about every 5 minutes. On the plus side, I contacted the people at 3D Album and they were very helpful and friendly. Its too bad the program isn't the same. I made sure that I have the latest updates, and yet the programs still crashes. I have about 15 years of experience with computers and video editing programs. If 3D Album could do what it advertised to do for the low price, it could be a winner. A person would be wise to wait until the bugs are worked out of this program before spending hard earned money.

I have the old version 2.03 and upgraded to the new version about 10 days ago. The new version is a huge upgrade. I was surprised to find that the new package contains almost all tools for my photo needs. It is no longer a picture show only software. Its photo organizer, printing, and editing features are as powerful as those professional tools. But what set this software apart to other products is still its 3d picture show tool. For these who want create movie-style picture shows, this is a must-have. Lots of new 3d styles and new controls are added in the new version. More selections. The DVD movie capture is integrated in the program.

This software is difficut to use, slow (even on my P4 3.2GHz HT w/ 1GB RAM), and doesn't do everything that the box and the users guide states. The tech support is poor, and they apparently do not understand proper english.

Some people really love this program, but I don't get it. What bugs me the most is that it doesn't use the standard windows buttons and layouts. I must be really dumb, but I can't figure out how to save my slideshow because there is no save option! So if you want to create an album and make a few changes and save it as something else (so you can compare the two), as far as I know, you can't. After checking the help groups and reading tips, I sort of found out how to do it, but it was so complicated. I had to go into the file I originally saved and make changes there, not in 3D Album itself. How convoluted!

But I could put up with that if the albums themselves worked. I tried two different albums, both had the same problems. They would freeze after flipping through a few pages. The album would end, the book would close and yet my pictures were still flipping in mid air. The shortcut created on the desktop would open the album but noting else, it would crash everytime.

If you want a really good photo editor and a good slideshow (it won't have 3D backgrounds, maybe if you create them) try Ulead's PhotoImpact XL. For the price you get 1000 times more product and it works 100%