Rating: Summary: Very passable for what it is..... Review: Anyone buying this product with the idea of competing with higher end products (Photoshop, Coreldraw, etc..) will be bitterly dissapointed. If you buy it for relatively simple graphics applications you will love it. I do all our company's fliers, memos, and counter stands with this program. It is quick, it's easy, and I don't have to spend a great amount of time to get simple projects done. I use this in conjunction with the Works Portfolio and have had great success. It is also really nice to be able to "save as" in .pdf format. Good Job Broderbund!
Rating: Summary: Very Poor Photo Printing Review: Bottom line: does a poor job of printing photo's. Tried the help desk, but they knew little more than me. I wanted to like this program. It's the only one that I could find that would allow me to print the inside of a card and then the outside. That would negate the need to feed a printed photo back through my printer to print the inside. I have a 2ghz Dell and a Canon S820 printer which does a great job printing photo's. I inserted a high res photo into my card. The print out was very grainy. I tried lightening the photo and it helped a little. I then printed the same photo OUTSIDE of Print Shop and it looked great Obviously the problem is within Print Shop. I sent it back. I can't believe it would print photo's so bad, but it did.
Rating: Summary: great for some, not for others Review: Even though there were a lot of negative reviews I bought this product mostly because PC Magazine rated it one of the best (5 stars) and the price can't be beat with the discounts. Here's my take if you read the other reviews like I did. This program tries to make it easy to start a project (with a walk through wizard) but with any publishing software, you have to know what you are doing. That includes understanding your printer settings, etc. Yes, printer settings can be changed with the program (as with most any software) so it will take some time for inexperienced users to understand how to use it properly. I must say, this program offers a ton of nice clip art, photos, etc than most other programs in this class. It has 2 CD's full of clipart but you'll need a lot of disk space to install it all. The broadband version of PrintShop accesses the clipart from the internet but with big hard drives available these days, save yourself some headache and buy the regular software, not the broadband one. If you don't have a lot of harddrive space (a few gigs to spare) I wouldn't suggest buying this. There is no user manual included and the help files are not as in depth as I would like. I find it hard to believe that a complicated program such as this does not have at least a printable copy of a user manual. So be warned, if you not an experienced software user this product might not be for you. I also saw some negative reviews on photo editing/printing. I haven't tried it so I can't compare. (I use other software for photo editing and printing). There are a lot of great photo editing software packages available. If you're purchasing this for that reason, you might want to look somewhere else. This thing is for printing out greeting cards, postcards, and things of that nature. I guess you can be thankful that there is photo editing features with this at all. Final take - For someone who has used software since they were young and does for a living, I could figure most things out on my own. If you are inexperienced, you may find this product frustrating. But for the price, you get a lot of nice clipart and wizards to help for most basic home desktop publishing needs (greeting cards, postcards, calendars, etc).
Rating: Summary: Print Shop 15 Review: Excellent product. I have never had an installation problem on 6 versions and upgrades and 5 different computers. Each version had slight improvements so other than a fanatic you can wait before upgrading. Product has no problems and if you register you get offered the next upgrade at a discount.Easy for beginners. Has lots of features available only on photoshop. The only disadvantage is the cards are all saved in proprietary format.
Rating: Summary: Photo Magic Made Easy Review: Hey Everyone I have this product and I think the Print Shop 15 is the best one they created. I haven't had any problems with any of the print shops programs that I have purchased. I do all my photo's using this program and the designs are outstanding. I admit it takes time to learn all the ins and outs of it, but all programs you have to learn by trial and error. I have the previous version of it also. Every time the new program comes out I buy it. The Print Shop is the very first one I bought and I am not sorry I did. Its thanks to the Print Shop that I got so interested in learning what I could create and wow it was awesome. The best part of this fantastic program is you can do almost anything with your photos and so much more. I learned to change the backgrounds, add special effects, add sounds, add more scenes into the picture and combine them into one. You can crop, adjust brightness, contrast, change background color, and they also put in where you edit your own colors for your text and so much much more. They have some very beautiful graphics in this program and I constantly work with it every day and I learn more as I go. The best part is watching my photo's take on a whole new look. Its thanks to the Print Shop that I can take an ordinary photo and turn into something that I can treasure. I wouldn't know what to do without my Print Shop program. I just love this program, the best buy I ever made. I even look for their emails in my emails and its the very first one I open. I can't wait to see what the next one will be if they come out with a new one. They got me as a lifetime customer!
Rating: Summary: Good for Experienced and Patient Users! Review: Honestly, it is not easy to use this product. No printed user guide. Only help file. But if you spend more time on it- trial and error, you will find this product instersting! For the amount of graphics and projects available, this product rocks! From childish clip art to fine art - everything you can imagine, you can find them in this product. I espcially like the search function which allows me to type keywords like "flower" to find projects and graphics. You have 4749 choices for "flower"! 638 for "family"! 237 for "romantic"! 518 for "moon"! 6330 for "food"! 180 birthday card readymade projects, etc! Awesome! For ease of use, this product has room for improvement. NoPrinted user manual. Only help file. No internet user forum. Sometimes the labels printed by it are not fit. But that's because I am not using any avery products. If you are patient enough, go to "tools" menu and run the "custom paper wizard", then you can creat the right size label you want. That's not bad. You can use this wizard to creat any custom paper: card , envelopes, labels, banner, etc... i recommend users better use a piece of paper to test if the program prints right first. Then adjust to fit. Not convenient huh? But I believe that no software would print exactly the way if you do not do some page setup. As for the "BUG" issues, I have not encountered any so far. This program has never hang or automatically closed (my experience). I am using M$ Win200 OS. My machine is 2 years old. 50 bucks for such hugh graphic collections (4 CDs)and paper stock included in the package is really reasonable. BUT, if you are graphics collecting freak, then try Art Explosion 150,000 or 600,000. By the way, I bought the retail box set in Hong Kong - Very satisfied!
Rating: Summary: Experienced Print Shop user Review: I bought the print shop deluxe version 15 because I had been very pleased with its previous editions. Well not with this one. It installed only part of the program, I uninstalled the whole program and started installation again, but the program insists it is already installed. So here I sit with a new program that is useless. Have contacted Broderbund but have not had a reply. Have had the computer checked out and it is the program not the computer causing the problem.
Rating: Summary: I am just thrilled with The Print Shop Deluxe 15! Review: I bought this software last week (got a great deal on it) and I absolutely love it. I've read alot of poor reviews on this site but despite that I decided to try it anyway. I'm am so glad that I did. I had no problems with installation & have had no problems at all using it. There are so many things you can do with this program & so many graphics to pick from. This is the only program you will need to do projects with. I like the fact that you can customize the label size so you can do anything that you want to. This program is so easy to use. I am no computer expert and I was able to pick up on it right away. I am also learning more each day about all of the features this program offers. If you are considering purchasing this program I would absolutely postively recommend it.
Rating: Summary: XP users Think Twice Review: I have installed the program completely and I when I go to choose the type of font I wish to use I recieve and error and the program shuts down and this happens over and over. The project I was trying to do...I will not be able to do it. I just blew 50.00 on a program that I cannot even get passed selecting a Font with?? Take the other reviewers advice Dont buy this! I am regretful that I did.
Rating: Summary: Not a lot of bang for the buck Review: I have previous versions of the Print Shop and thought it was good. I purchased PrintShop Deluxe on DVD, Ver. 15 because I couldn't get my old program to work on my new computer with WinXP. The new version seems to rely only on its built in graphics, photos and templates. There are not a lot of tools to do your own thing. I also had immediate problems with the software in scrolling through the fonts -- the program freezes. This is apparently a well-known problem to Broderbund as their "fix" on the web page is to delete several of the fonts. When I asked why (through their customer service site) there was no fix and they thought it was acceptable to delete fonts, they blamed it on XP and then invited me to buy their newest version. I guess I thought that's what I was doing when I was at CompUSA. Now I know...they keep the old [stuff] out there until it's sold out.
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