In the
old days, families ended up with piles of photos stored
in shoeboxes under the bed or in the closet. In our digital age,
the photos still pile up, but they're sitting on our computers'
hard drives. To fix this, MAGIX's PhotoStory
on CD & DVD 2004
lets you organize digital pictures into CD and DVD-based
slideshows that the family can watch on a TV. It's an easy and
fast solution-essentially a Microsoft PowerPoint for the home-that
lets you organize and view your photos.
The program
gives you tools to compile and arrange digital
pictures and photos into electronic albums or slideshows. And
once you're happy with your slideshow, you may burn them
onto a CD (Video CD or VCD format) or DVD so you may
view the slideshow on any television that's equipped with a DVD player.
The software works with photos from digital cameras and scanners and a variety of image, video and sound files. You simply select photos; drag and drop them into an order that you like, and then burn CDs and DVDs, create streaming videos for the Internet or save the slideshow as an .AVI format movie for use in other projects. If you want, you may add transitions, effects and music or record and apply your own voice narration. The program also comes with special effects that include virtual camera movements, images, music, text styles, special FX, cross fades, zooms, subtitles, video clips and panorama movements.
The program comes with the useful MAGIX Photo Clinic 2.0, a 24-bit image editor that you may use to fix photos. It adjusts brightness, sharpness, color and focus, and can remedy red-eye. It also adds flashy photo effects such as fish-eye, mosaic, painting and cartoon-style, and can resize and restore images.
In use, the program could be easier to use and needs to take a lesson from Microsoft's PowerPoint. In PhotoStory, there's no equivalent for PowerPoint's slide sorter, so moving slides around, particularly when you have a large slide show, is awkward. For all practical purposes, you need to organize the photos as you add them to the slide show.
The program won't let you burn more than 99 slides onto a CD, but lets you exceed this number when making slideshows. It's only when you're ready to burn a CD that you find out that you can't because you've exceeded the 99-slide limit and the program doesn't tell you how many slides are in your show. While the program works fine, it has a rough feel to it.
Beyond organizing memories, PhotoStory acts as a backup to preserve photo memories on disc. And it's a fine way to distribute pictures to grandparents, relatives and friends. Rough edges and all, PhotoStory on CD & DVD is a good program for organizing your digital family photos and watching them in entertaining slide shows.
MAGIX PhotoStory is available through major retailers for $39.99 SRP.
12/3/03 www.daytrum.com Editorial Staff
