Description:
While most digital cameras include some basic photo editing software, users often discover that they need something a bit more robust. Jasc After Shot: Premium Edition caters to this audience, as it offers basic uploading, editing, and sharing capabilities without requiring a time-consuming tutorial or complicated instruction manual. After installing After Shot, you can decide whether to take the QuickTour or just dive right in and start working. We choose the latter, as the QuickTour requires the Shockwave player, which we didn't feel like downloading. Even without any introduction, we were quickly able to access our images with a single click on the camera icon. After Shot offers easy-to-use options for organizing your images, including photo-album-creation capabilities. You can also sort your images by name, date, and size. When it comes to actually editing your images, After Shot offers all the basics, including cropping, rotating, and color and sharpness adjustment. There's also a Quick Fix option, which automatically adjusts the brightness and color balance of any or all of your images. The only real issue we had with the editing portion of the product was the following: to remove red eye, you simply click on the Red Eye icon and then run your mouse over the red eye you wish to reduce. When we tried this on a friend's very red pair of blue eyes, we kept getting the message "Unable to detect enough red in the region you clicked on." However, we were able to accomplish this same goal by using the Red Eye Brush, which only added another step or two to our editing project. When it comes to sharing your edited images, After Shot again gives you all the basic tools--support for online print services, Web templates for creating HTML files and uploading photos, tools for creating screen savers and wallpapers with your photos, etc. You can also create QuickTime movies with your photo album, which simply requires installing QuickTime 5 if you don't already have it. If time is short and quality is important, After Shot: Premium Edition is an affordable, easy-to-use, and extremely user-friendly companion to any digital camera. --Gisele Toueg
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