The kind folks over at Scrapbook Max generously sent me a copy of their cute CD to play with, I’m sure in hopes that I’d tell ya’ll to run right out and buy copies for everyone you know! I played around with it, and I’ll have to give it a qualified thumbs up…

SCRAPBOOK MAX

LOVE: the cute graphics on the box and the CD!!

NOT SO MUCH: the premade pages that come with the program. They seem really kind of out of date, and a little low quality. Kind of like what you’d see from a very new designer. Seems to me they could get some better quality graphics and layouts made.

LOVE: the interface is fairly intuitive for this PS user. You resize and move things with handles just like in PS. The menus are fairly clear and easy to follow.

NOT SO MUCH: limited editing ability – for example, I wanted to erase a portion of my photo so it looked like it was ‘behind’ something, and could not figure out how to do that.

LOVE: the ease with which I was able to browse photos and my own scrap supplies.

NOT SO MUCH: the output options which are a little complicated and seem set up to make you purchase from them.

BOTTOM LINE: Scrapbook Max is a cute program with lots of potential. I like that it maintains a lot of conventions from other editing programs, minimizing the learning curve. I’m not thrilled with the enclosed graphics, though they have great kits available through their store and you can use your own stash. Maybe a gift for someone who really isn’t into scrapbooking but would like to make some cute albums quick? Especially someone like my mom who has no interest in learning software but would get a kick out of putting photos in QPs and adding journaling.

Then I got a license for FotoFusion Scrapbook Essentials at a very good price. I’ve seen several people using this, so thought I’d give it a whirl.

FOTOFUSION Scrapbook Essentials

LOVE: there is great stuff that comes with the program, good quality and stylish papers.

NOT SO MUCH: I had a great deal of difficulty getting to the downloadable items. Many didn’t show up, the items in the ‘free’ category were showing that they cost a particular amount of ‘credits’. The connection to the internet kept turning off, though other programs (Hello, ICQ) maintained their connection, so it wasn’t me.

That said, getting stuff from my own stash in wasn’t as hard.

LOVE: some of the automated things, like how you can swap photos between two frames by dragging and dropping.

NOT SO MUCH: many of the tools have difficult interfaces with more than one click to get to what you want to do.

BOTTOM LINE: pretty steep learning curve, I’d surely have to spend some time with tutorials and learn an entirely new way of thinking about scrapping. I do know some very savvy Photoshop users who love this program though. One even told me she still uses it to scrap quick layouts. I’ll have to find out if she learned FF or PS first. Again, this would be a great program for the quick scrap, if you never wanted to do anything more than that.

SO, IN SUMMARY…

I talk to people a lot about digiscrapping, and often am asked what program I recommend. I think I will still have to stick with Photoshop Elements for beginning digiscrappers. It’s fairly inexpensive (though still twice what these programs cost), but it is VERY fully featured. AND (this is the important part) once you get good with it, and want to do more complex things, you will be WELL on your way to understanding Photoshop. It seems to me that if you’re going to invest money and especially time in learning a program, you should not have to throw all that away to move to another level of expertise. There are a great number of tutorials available that are geared just to digiscrappers, and you can get advice and assistance from any number of forums.

Now I KNOW there are a zillion of you who will argue with me, and who LOVE both of these programs! More power to you! They both serve a purpose, and do some things very well. But I can’t recommend them wholeheartedly, as I think if you are going to invest your time and money in something, it should be something that you will be able to use forever. And since I’m still learning about Photoshop after more than 10 years working with it, I’m confident that I’ll be using it and learning forever!

Happy Scrapping!

I don’t like it – no, not one bit!

Well that was easy.

The basic premise of the site is that you upload your photos into galleries and albums and then share these with friends, families and strangers. They have a slide show feature where it fades from one to the next. I don’t know if you can make the galleries private but there are thousands of galleries that are public loaded with goofy pictures of people.

Once the pictures are uploaded, the site gives you basic editing capabilities like fixing red eye, straightening crooked pictures and a few neat special effects. But the site is slooooooooowwwwwwwwww………….. You’re waiting for the changes to take place or pictures to load. Really frustrating.

Jenn looked it over and she summed it up best: “It’s useful if you’re in the lobby of a hotel on your way out and you just have to fix that bit of red eye before you email the picture out to MySpace or Facebook”. Otherwise, it’s kind of useless for editing (because it’s so slow and limited) and there are lots of better, faster sharing sites like Flickr or Photobucket.

Sorry Adobe, I think ya missed it this time.

Till next time, Keep Scrappin!

Stan – The DaddyKitty