Here’s a handy addition to your toolbox! If you want to use photos on your
web site, you need to know about right-sizing them, compression, format, color
depth and a variety of other technical details, or, you need to have a handy
photo processing program ready to use that doesn’t require a year’s study before
you can use it! Ideally, you should be able to acquire this program without
having to take out a second mortgage on the house! Jasc Software agrees! They
kindly produce "After Shot" to fit just that bill.
"After Shot is designed to organize, fix and share your photos from your
digital camera," say the folks at Jasc. Of course, you could take your photos
with one of those old cameras; you know — the ones with film in them. You would
them have your favorite film developer provide you with your pictures on CD as
well as prints. Alternatively, if you have all the time (and patience!) in the
world, you could scan them yourself. My recommendation? Buy the digital camera!
It won’t take long to pay for itself; buying, developing and printing film is
expensive.
A little housekeeping: the version of After Shot that I installed is 1.00. I
have, however used the built-in update mechanism to obtain and install version
1.03. My copy is running on Windows XP. The program calls for a Pentium or
equivalent, with 64M RAM, 60MB of hard drive space, a CD-ROM, a minimum of
800×600 256 color display and Windows 98/NT4/2000/ME/XP. Detailed information
about the product is available at
http://www.jasc.com. You can buy the product there also. The download
version currently sells for US$45.00. The boxed version is US$49.00.
While After Shot is primarily designed for use with digital cameras, the
thoughtful JASC programmers have included routines to "Acquire" images from any
Twain Source, including scanners, and a convenient "Open Picture CD" routine.
After Shot includes support for dozens of digital cameras, including all the
more popular ones. On XP, After Shot supports the WIA (Windows Image
Acquisition) protocol to provide direct support for all those cameras with WIA
device drivers (most cameras).
After Shot uses the notion of Albums to organize your photos. An Album is a
collection of photos in a folder. When you are looking at After Shot’s main
view, the Browse view, you have a hierarchical view of your system’s folder on
the left, much like Windows Explorer. Navigation is intuitive and simple. Tabs
are provided that enable the attachment of Information and Keywords to the
Album, and to Search for albums or images based on that information or those
keywords in addition to tradition search mechanisms such as file name.
Double click on a photo in an Album and you open up the photo view. Again
there are the tabs for Info and Keywords so that these can be attached to each
photo. There’s also an "Album" tab, which shows the Album as a filmstrip on the
left, enabling you to see the location of this picture in the Album, relative to
the other pictures in there with it.
While in the photo view, you can use the zoom tool to zoom in and out with
the left and right mouse buttons, and you can use all the neat editing and
fix-up tools available. Cropping the image is a breeze with the very easy to
understand cropping tool. There is an intelligent "Fix" tool the automatically
adjusts a variety of image settings, making the picture look better without you
having to know what it’s adjusting. Of course, if you do know what to adjust,
you can also manually fix just about every aspect of the picture. There is also
a tool that stitches pictures into a panorama. Take a series of side by side,
slightly overlapping pictures and automatically stitch them into a seamless
panorama. There’s even the ability to add voice-overs to your images.
After Shot also has a group of photo sharing tools. Printing your picture in
standard photo sizes could hardly be simpler. There’s also support for on-line
print services in case you don’t have a photo quality printer. You can make
Quicktime movies out of your pictures, send them off via your email program or
make desktop wallpaper and screensavers out of them. Then you get to the top two
features: you can make a portable slideshow of them that is perfect for burning
onto a CD; and the number one feature: After Shot has web templates with which
you can automatically make HTML files with all links, etc. in place ready to
upload to your server as an on-line photo album. Make a few of these and you’ll
have an engaging web site built in no time!
All these features work great right out of the box (or the download <g>) but
just about every aspect of them can be controlled through option choices should
you wish to do so. The program includes a "Quick Tour", which is nice, but even
without using that, it is so intuitive and easy to use that there is very little
learning time involved. As you work with it, however, and explore a little
further, you will be surprised by the extent of control and the amount of power
that this economical and well thought out program provides.
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