When
PhotoSuite opens, you are greeted with 6 icons — Get, Prepare, Compose,
Organize, Share, and Print. by Ron Ring
September 2002
I picked up PhotoSuite 4 Platinum Edition to review because my son has been using PhotoSuite III for a couple of years, and he says that it does everything he wants. I, on the other hand, have been using Paint Shop Pro 7 for the last year, and find that it does everything plus more than I want to do. And we go around and around, and everything I show him that I have done with Paint Shop Pro he will do in PhotoSuite, and in less time. Which bugs me to no end.
The retail price of this program is $49.95. On the Web, a quick search came up with prices around $46. If I was buying it, I would go retail, no shipping, and no wait. MGI Software produced PhotoSuite. After this product first came out, MGI was purchased by Roxio, in January of 2002. Roxio is the company formed as the software subsidiary of Adaptec, and later spun off as an independent company.
When I open the box I found a case containing 2 CD’s, a 64 page manual, and a registration card with a Poster print ad. The minimum requirements for PhotoSuite 4 are a 166 MHz Pentium with MMX, but it will run on all versions of Windows except 3.11. Needs 32 MB of RAM, a SVGA Video Card, 800 x 600 screen size, High color (16 Bit color) and 200 MB hard disk space for a full install.
The actual install was simple and straightforward. After the install I updated the program, by adding a few option packs from the internet. After using the program for a couple hours and editing a couple pictures, the PhotoSuite 4 directory bloomed up to 650 MB. So be warned. This is a graphics editing program, and if you are anywhere near the minimum requirements, the program will be annoyingly slow.
When
PhotoSuite opens, you are greeted with 6 icons — Get, Prepare, Compose,
Organize, Share, and Print.
The Get icon lets you access your pictures from your hard disk, scanner, Photo Album, or digital camera. PhotoSuite supports a wide range of cameras and scanners for easy input into the program. And TWAIN is fully supported.
The Prepare icon is where you adjust your pictures and edit them. All the standard stuff is here, brightness and contrast, Magic wand, and tools to remove red eye. You have to go through multiple pages to get where you want. I found this to be a little tiresome, but in the end I found what I wanted. This also where you can stitch a picture together. Of all the functions in this program I found this to be the best. I have tried to stitch in other programs and never got it right. The only caveat is that your pictures, or pieces of pictures, must be the same size, not one pixel different. And your only adjustment tool is a slider, which means that it is very difficult to do when adjusting the size of pictures. A text box would have made it a lot easier.
The Compose icon is where you can put your pictures into Calendars, Cards, Posters and other similar things. I found that most desktop publishing programs will do a better job of doing this.
The Organize icon is for the Photo Album. This is very basic, but if you don’t have one, it will do for a start.
The Share icon is where you are able to send E-mail multimedia files. Most other Desktop printing programs will do that, but not photo editing programs.
And, last but not least, the Print icon is where you print your pictures. A nice feature is the one where you can print multiple pictures of different sizes on a single page. A real page-saver when using costly photo paper. You can also publish to the Web and send pictures to Kodak for printing.
Overall, I will still prefer Paint Shop Pro 7 over PhotoSuite 4. I will, however, use PhotoSuite anytime I need to do any photo stitching. And for any real quick editing where speed of editing is what you are after, PhotoSuite’s sliders work best. But for finer control of editing, I still think that Paint Shop does a better job, even if it takes a little longer.
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Product InformationPhotoSuite 4 Platnum Edition |