Customer Reviews

Nova Development US Photo Explosion Deluxe 4.0

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

I used 3.0 all the time to open up a photo, add some quick text for a logo on top of my photo. I would then add a frame around the photo (there were several different options of cool effects), to block out some of the background stuff in the photo.

The new version, does not have a simple Insert Text feature like 3.0 did. 3.0 allowed you to insert text, and grab the selection bar windows to easily move it around, rotate it, make the text bigger, etc.
With 4.0, you first have to select the text tool, then increase your font (and change it if you wish). If you want to move the text, you have to then select the move tool (another step). If you want to rotate it, you then have to go to the menu, and go through a couple of steps before you manually have to put in what degree angle you want to rotate it. It was much simpler and easier in the old version because you could do it all from one place.

I used the magic effects and frame features all the time in 3.0, there was alot of cool black and white effects that you can make a pic look really elegant (I'm a cake decorator so I used it to block out the background so the cake would be focused better). In 4.0, you can't do it in the Image Editor.
The step in 4.O:
1. Create a new project in Project Studio
2. Add your photo.
3. Add your border (which are horrible,theres no magic effects anymore, and no elegant black and white effects to place around your pic).
4. If you find one you like, you then have to save your project.
5. Then you have to export it to a jpg.

I'm really surprised they took out some functionality of 3.0 and made everything more difficult. I'm now searching for a software that will allow me to quickly add text and some elegant photo effects around the edges.

Photo Explosion Deluxe Review

Made a scrapbook page and that was fairly easy and straightforward. Had some nice features but nothing that blew me away or that other programs didn't have. Every page was different so you couldn't make a scrapbook album that matched just one page.

Working on pictures in albums - Once in the quick fix studio you couldn't go from picture to picture to fix. You had to go out to the home main screen and then pick another picture and go back into quick fix. Added time to an already time consuming task. Not so quick to fix.

Also there is a back and forward button at the top but they didn't have an apparent function. They did nothing for me. You would think that it would take you to the next picture in the album or back but it didn't do anything. Consulted that nice big manual and there was nothing there about it!

Manual spent chapter after chapter about organizing photos and very little on special features. Found that odd and frustrating.

Saving a finished fix photo took a bit of time which on other programs is relatively fast. It took 8 seconds to just crop a picture and to save to file took anywhere from 25 to 45 seconds. I have never waited that long on other programs and when you are trying to go through 400 photos in an album that is very slow going! I also had nothing else running on my pc and plenty of memory so it wasn't my pc with the issues.

Slide show could only have one transition and it was used for all frames. Wasn't easy to move pictures around into an order that you wanted. Since it took so long editting my pictures I never did finish a slide show - it was taken too long and I have other much better programs for that. Even some freeware and shareware slide show programs have more features.

Didn't like that even though the program comes in one disk it is broken up into 3 programs and requires you to go back and forth among them. Definately something I have never seen and a feature I didn't appreciated - why not keep it all together?

One feature I found very interesting and was ready to try out was the "slimmy" feature - to slim you down a bit on a photo. After reading everything on it and going to the help menu I still wasn't able to get this feature to work at all.

All in all this would not be a program that I would recommend or purchase - would give it 2-3 stars for making projects, scrapbook pages, fun text, etc... but not very useable for slide shows. I feel even a first timer would find it too frustrating to use and slow.

Thumbs down on this one!

Gail DeHelian

*This review was posted by a member of the Nova Development User Community (NDUC). NDUC members are real people who use Nova Development products and share relevant feedback about the products they use in order to help other users. More information about NDUC, its programs and members is available on the Nova Development website.

Like many other customers I too had version 3 and loved it. When I purchased my new computer I was told by the salesman that the older version would probably not work with windows 7 so I purchased this new version. It is nothing like the older version and not at all an improvement. Who ever designed this made it way too complicated. It is a frustrating nightmare to use. Does not have the same wonderful features as the older version. Hard to navigate. I have tried numerous times to figure this program out and I get more frustrated each time. Don't buy this if you have expectations of it working as the older versions of photo explosion. Everyone that has purchased this product should let Nova know that they have let their customers down in a big way. What were they thinking?

I had the original version which I loved and used a great deal, but had to upgrade to version Deluxe 4.0 for Vista. Now I hate it. Although it has many interesting features, I've wasted many many hours (days!) searching for the help I need - to no avail. I can't find anything I need by using either "Search", the physical manual or its index, software tutorials, or the software "help".... I do not have time for this, and am extremely frustrated by this practically useless (to me) software.

There were many more photo frames in the early version, and they were beautiful and they automatically fitted themselves to the photos; now you have to waste time dragging the limited, ugly frames in this version to fit the photos.

The "Magic Edges" for photos in the early version were easy to find and use. Now I can't find them anywhere after days of searching. Also I cannot find the "Particle Effects" by index, manual, help, tutorials, or search... Where are they???

This version of software is evidently designed for retired or otherwise non-working people who have all the time in the world to waste.

With the rebate and sales price I only paid $[...] for this, but it's useless to me when I can't find anything I need, so that is $[...] wasted, and I can't return it since the package was thrown out.

Photo Explosion Deluxe 4.0 is great photo software! It's packed with features and is fairly intuitive to use. It is similar to Photo Explosion 4.0, except it has three additional programs, which allow you to create montages, morph two photos into one, and create slideshows with background music that others can view on TV. If you won't use the extra programs, then I recommend Photo Explosion 4.0; but I think the extra programs are well worth the extra money!! Tutorials are all text-based (I would like to see some as Flash movies) and fairly easy to get the information needed.

MontagePlus allows you to create a composite photo comprised of thumbnail images of photos. It's very easy to do, but it uses its own default thumbnails to make up the photo you select. I couldn't figure out how to have it use thumbnails of my photos. It provides you with printing instructions so you can print and tape together several sheets of paper to make a poster-sized montage.

FantaMorph is a fun program that allows you to morph one photo into another. You select the two photos, crop and edit, then put dots on key places (e.g. eyes, nose, mouth, if you're morphing faces) on the first photo, adjusting the location on the 2nd photo so the morph is smooth. The more dots, the smoother the morph. You can specify how long the movie is (how long it takes to morph from photo 1 to photo 2), and you can even add special effects and captions! It's a fairly easy and very fun program!

MemoriesOnTV allows you to create a slide show; add background music, transitions between the slides, and captions, then burn it to a DVD that can be watched on a TV. The end product looks good, but it's a little tricky to get started. The help menu is pretty good. I couldn't directly import my iTunes music to the slide show album as background music; first you have to convert it to an appropriate format, and then import it. The special effects are easy to apply.

Project Studio, Image Editor, Album, and Panorama Plus are the same as in Photo Explosion 4.0 (the non-Deluxe version). Project Studio allows you to create greeting cards, calendars, family trees, journals, scrapbooks, magazine covers. You can either choose a project that is already set up and import the picture(s), change the words, fonts, and effects (such as shadows on the text or put frames on the photos). There are lots of options to customize! More creative people can create these types of projects and more (e.g. booklets and brochures) from scratch.

The Image Editor allows you to edit all aspects of your photos, from cropping and removing red eye to removing blemishes and whitening teeth. It's not as intuitive as Project Studio, but the tutorials are thorough, taking you step-by-step through each activity; however, be sure you know the names of all the toolbars! Image Editor is the most complex program and would benefit from Flash movie tutorials, rather than simple text tutorials, because there are so many tools and toolbars.

Photo Explosion Album allows you to organize your photos, tag (categorize) them, and share them on social networking and other websites. I particularly like the tagging feature. You can tag photos with the standard tags they provide (e.g. family or events), create your own tags, and create subcategories (for example "Uncle Andy" under Family). This allows you to search for all the photos with a certain tag. I make lots of photo books using Picaboo, and I haven't figured out how to have Picaboo call up the Photo Explosion Album, it only searches my photos folder--don't know if this is a Picaboo problem or a Photo Explosion problem (or operator error!). It's very easy to upload photos to websites, or as a screen saver, or to the other Photo Explosion programs.

PanoramaPlus allows you to turn a series of photos or a video into a horizontal, vertical, tiled, or 360 degree panorama. It's a fairly simple program--download the photos or video and click "stitch". There are a few simple editing tools and you can print the product. It's also easy to email the panorama, or export it as a PDF, JPEG/TIFF/etc, or a movie.

All-in-all a fun software package that I highly recommend!

*This review was posted by a member of the Nova Development User Community (NDUC). NDUC members are real people who use Nova Development products and share relevant feedback about the products they use in order to help other users. More information about NDUC, its programs and members is available on the Nova Development website.

I had gotten a free version of an earlier edition of this program when I bought a printer a few years back. I thoroughly enjoyed using it, so when it didn't work on my new computer, I thought it was time for an upgrade. When I purchased this version, I was excited about the new features, but I found that many of them did not work on my computer even though it exceeds the minimum operation requirements. I also found the new user interface of the program annoying and inefficient compared to earlier versions and other photo editing software. Your money would be much better spent elsewhere - you may have to pay a little more for other programs, but at least they work.

My Laptop got a virus (Yep, first time ever) and I lost a lot of things. I had installed MGI Photosuite, WHICH I LOVE, and have for a LONG time, but I could not find the Disc! I have recently moved to Honolulu, and I could not find Photosuite ANYWHERE. So, I settled for Photo Explosion. The only thing this program could do to make me happy would be to actully explode. I DETEST IT. If you have hours of time to spare, and don't mind hitting keys until your fingers bleed, JUST TO CLONE, then this is for you. I know how to work photo programs, and this one is ridiculous, with so many "features" that are worthless and just get in the way and are confusing. The Manual didn't help much either, and getting my photos INTO any other folder but Photo Explosion was a nightmare. I have ordered Photosuite and cannot WAIT to get it.
I sell online; I have a store. My images need to be very good. I can thank Photo Explosion for making my job longer, more tedious and for the poor results. I do not recommend this.

I have been using Photo Explosion 3 for the past couple of years and absolutely loved it. I upgraded my computer to Windows 7 and found Photo Explosion 3 would not work with it so I purchased Photo Explosion 4. I do newsletters for organizations and 4 does not compare in any way to 3. I have lost the ability to add various artistic touches to my photos like adding snow, rain, a charcoal pencil effect, photo edges and so on. The new one has some features but I am frustrated by the lack of continutiy between programs. WHY CAN'T NOVA JUST MAKE PHOTO EXPLOSION 3 COMPATIBLE WITH WINDOWS 7? I would be glad to pay for the exact same program that would work with Windows 7. I suppose they did not make a patch available because they wanted to sell Explosion 4 but those of us who value Explosion 3 would pay for that as well at least I would.

I very happily used an older version of Photo Explosion for years - loved it! Then I bought a new laptop and that software wasn't compatible with Windows 7, which is the only reason I ordered the new Deluxe 4.0 version. I've given it a couple of weeks now, but my opinion hasn't changed - it's no where near as user friendly as the older version.

It's really a challenge even figuring out what all the tabs and buttons do let alone finding directions on how to do different tasks. Where everything you could do with the previous program was all rolled into one nice icon on my desktop, this is split into three separate, each accomplishing different tasks.

Of course there is a manual - a nice thick one, though I find it surprising that a program all about visuals should have text/tech heavy manual with very few illustrations or images.

In all fairness, if you never used the older (far friendlier!) version and you're already pretty comfortable using photoshop then you may find this software suitable, but I'm probably going to uninstall and file it.

The one thing that i bought this for
was to be able to "Blur Backgrounds" shown right in the boxe's inner flap
not able to find any info on this in the "Help" sections or searches.
Not very user friendly
Can't understand any of it
had to pay to have it installed
and i still don't see the morph feature??
can't figure out layers and the "Help" section is far from helpful.

Maybe Mensa members can figure this system out.