Feature: Corel Photo Album 6 is a versatile and easy to use image organizer
Motivation: In combo with PaintShop Pro X, CPA is top value for digital camera users

Corel is starting to hit on all cylinders in its new products reaching the market. Corel Designer Suite which we reviewed here adds real productivity improvements to technical design; PaintShop Pro X in our first looks also scored top marks . So we were not surprised when reviewing Corel Photo Album to find it chock full of that graphics conundrum - powerful features yet remaining fairly easy to use. Even better, Corel Photo Album Standard edition comes as part of the one of the best digital camera bargains - the PaintShop Pro X package .

The starting screenshot above, really tells a lot about Corel Photo Album. It is feature packed yet remains fairly straight forward to navigate and use. The four tabs across the top organize the features of CPA-Corel Photo Album into logical groups:
Organize - means image management as folders, trays and collections with backup, slides, etc;
Enhance - provides remarkably complete image editing with clever dialogs and tools;
Create - has templates and projects for creating greeting cards, eCards, calendars,collages, etc;
Share - provides for burning a CD, creating photo email, slideshow, video CD, or Web gallery;

This is a formidable set of features improved by project and templates made available for enhance and Create processes. These templates with CPA's dialogs really simplify complex tasks. For example, the Adjust dialog under the Enhance tab has an auto-version which considerably eases the process of fixing a photo. Photofinishers are taken through a 4 step process with before and after thumbnails depicting what will happen. And these features extend to creating monthly calendars or greeting cards.

What You need to Master

Having done a tour of major photo album software, it is becoming obvious that the tools have moved well beyond the classic directory treeview plus table of thumbnails. True - that is what we feature in the screenshot above but Corel Photo Album - CPA goes well beyond these bare bones. First, CPA is a download and upload tool. As soon as you add a new USB, Flash Card or other plug and play connection to your computer, CPA is onto the connection and if it detects any graphics files on the new device it will ask you what to do next and then guide users through the process of downloading the pictures from camera or storage device to their computer. Caution - for a hundred or more images it may be faster to just do the transfer of images in Windows Explorer.

On the upload side there are trays available for printing, emailing or uploading to a Web album service like Kodak's Easy Gallery or Shutterfly. Each of the trays has its own special dialog, again leading the user through the process of printing, emailing, or uploading image files contained in the tray. To add a photo to a tray, just right mouse click on the photo and from the popup menu choose Add to Photo Tray. A note of caution here - be careful on the size and number of files that you upload - more than 10 images and 5MB total size often can put a load either on your Internet connection, email service or printing costs.

So the essential containers that you must master in Corel Photo Album are folders, trays, and collections.Tays as we have just seen are temporary holders of images that we want to further process - print, email, or upload. Collections are virtual groupings of your photos that you can view without having to create copies of files. They contain photos that are stored in various places on your computer. You can create Collections of photos (again, just right mouse click on any single or group of selected photos and from the popup menu choose Add to Collection) to print, place in a slide show, or show off in a book. You can also delete images or and entire Collections without effecting the underlying images at all.

In contrast, Folders are just copies into thumbnails of all the image, graphics, and video files in a Windows directory. If you delete an image in a folder you are deleting it from your computer (the image goes to the recycle bin so it can be recovered if need be). File | Open Folder will open a folder and quickly create thumbnails for all the images in that folder. If you close CPA and then later restart it, all folders opened at close last time will be reopened and ready to use.

At this point there are a whole array of things that can be done with an image (or selected group of images) - see the screenshot above for details:
1)Right mouse click and select Add to Tray to place in a Tray;
2)Right mouse click and select Add to Collection to place in a Collection;
3)Right mouse click and select Add to Title and Description annotate the image;
4)Right mouse click and select E-mail to email the image;
5)Right mouse click and select Rotate, Rename to rotate or rename the image;
6)Drag and drop the image(s) onto another folder to copy them there;
7)Double click to go to Enhance mode where you can edit the image in the following ways:

A-Crop the image;
B-Quick Fix which does an automatic series of color, sharpness, and contrast best-guess adjustments. This works best on shots that need only minor tweaking; use the Adjust as a better alternative;
C-Adjust has two choices.
  1) a wizard that takes you through 4 adjustment steps - Color, Exposure, Vividness, Sharpness;
  2)a tabbed dialog box (see above) that provides for 5 basic adjustments:
    i-Flash/Backlighting, ii-Brightness/Contrast, iii-Color Balance, iv-Saturation, v-Sharpness
    which allows users to control any or all of the adjustments.
D-Red Eye does quick red eye removal;
E-Thinify stretches or compresses an image;
F-Add Text allows adding a captions to an image;
G-B+W changes an image to grayscale;
H-Sepia changes an image to sepia tone.
As one can see these are a fairly comprehensive set of quick image fixes. This reviewer has found them to be very helpful when making final, total picture adjustments - particularly the sharpness, saturation and brightness/contrast corrections.

However, there are some precautions about using Corel Photo Album for Organize and Enhance. First you need to go into Tools | Options to set some CPA start-up options:
 General tab - you may want to turn off Show getting Started Guide on Startup
 Catalog - if you have a big (20GB or greater) drive you may want to turn off Auto cataloging
 Database Backup - again, you may want to turn off Auto Database backup if you do it yourself
 Download - provides many options, choose carefully
 File Formats - again many options on default file compression
 PhotoSharing - nice to have Flickr here and user choice
 PhotoSafe Backup - set how often to remind yourself for backups
 Undo/Redo - set levels of undo
 Web Gallery - default photo and thumbnail size on gallery site
I have turned off the auto-catalog and download features, because I have a large disk drive - 80GB and found that auto-cataloging consumed too many resources for the return. Also I found the download speed much slower than simple file transfer with Windows Explorer. Finally, it would be nice to have a Copy To and Move To command in the right mouse popup menu for moving images from one folder to another. But even with these shortcomings, score CPA very strong for Enhance-ments and File Organizing. On this alone, Corel Photo Album is more than worth its $40 street price.

For the second half of this review which examines the Photo Album's goodies and share features, look here