REVIEW: Digital Photography Suite

At one point in my life my photos were organized.  They were placed in plastic film pages in photo books, pinned on a bulletin board, or artfully arranged in numerous scrapbooks.  I could take a look any time I wanted, and share them with family and friends as appropriate.

And then life got in the way.  Juggling myriad duties involving work, home, relationships, and personal responsibilities meant that often I didn’t even have time to take the film in to be developed.  When I finally did get them developed, they just sat in the return envelope taking up room in a drawer.

I was made for the era of digital photos!  No film to be developed, just upload from the memory card or camera to my computer, and everything is there at my fingertips.  I can instantly look at them and send on to friends via email.

Only problem – you still have to do some organization.  If not, you’ll have a bunch of photos labeled with strange looking numbers and you’ll have no idea what they are.  Put off the organization long enough, and you’ll have hundreds (if not thousands) of photos and you’ll have no idea what they are or where they are.  There is just no getting around it – if you take photos, and want to ever look at them again, you’re going to need to get organized.

Another feature that makes digital photography so versatile is the ability to make some corrections to your photos.  What you would once have tossed out, now can be cropped, sharpened, brightened, or otherwise massaged into an incredible shot.  As I’ve learned the hard way, however, this doesn’t magically occur.  You have to sit down in front of your computer and actually do it.  Which leads back to my previous organizational problem.

The kind people at Serif must have been reading my mind, because they asked if I’d be interested in giving their Digital Photo Suite software a try.  I jumped at the chance – thinking maybe, just maybe, this will be the impetus I need to get my photos in shape and get organized.

Like most software these days, Digital Photo Suite is easy to install and get going (you can install from a CD or download from the site)  Purchase price is $49.99.

But once you have things set up and are ready to go, what’s next?

First of all, let’s be realistic – this program is a tool.  It’s not going to organize your life or force you to sit down and get your photos organized.  If you’re motivated, it will lend a helping hand, but if you really aren’t motivated to get your photos in order, nothing is going to help you.  You can stop reading now, and accept that you will have a life unrecorded by photos.  If you are at the same point that I am, however, then sit in a chair and work through this.  There’s light at the end of the tunnel.

Like many of the photo programs available (both for free and for a fee), Digital Photo Suite promises that it is an easy way to do three things:

1. Organize your photos
2. Fix and enhance your photos
3. Share your photos

Let’s look at each of these steps.

Organize:  The bane of my existence, yet once I sat down and started to use the tools, I made remarkable progress in a relatively short period of time.  I decided that organizing my photos was my top priority, even if that meant I didn’t get to some of the other tools right away.

Digital Photo Suites has a number of tools to help you get your volumes of photos organized, and to set things up to integrate the new ones that come along.  This really isn’t rocket science, you basically set up albums for each of your photo collections.  This is pretty routine stuff.  Set your albums up by theme, vacation, years, or whatever works, and use keywords, tags, and ratings of your photos to get them in the right place and make them easy to find.  It was easy, if time consuming,to do,  But honestly there wasn’t anything new or different here that makes the organizational part of the process a standout over any other program.

Fix & Enhance:  OK, my photos were now organized in albums (or at least most of them were), and now it was time to do something with them.  This is the part of the program that I really think shines, although again, you need to be realistic – you are going to have sit down and do the work.

The easiest way to start tackling enhancing your photos is to use the QuickFix Studio.  It’s just what it say a quick fix – and will take care of a number of minor photo corrections:  brightness, color saturation, sharpness, contrast, removing red-eye and cropping.  This is where I spent the bulk of my time.  as I had a lot of photos to try to get through.  While many competitive program also have these features as well, I thought these were a bit easier to use, and more intuitive than many I’ve tried.

Other enhancing tools include many that are found in other photo editing programs:  color adjustment (sepia tones, black and white, pop art-style enhancements, etc.), and special effects (stained glass, watercolor look, etc.).

Tools that I found that were either unique, or better than the competition, were the portrait features (whiter teeth, tanner skin, etc.). the rotation feature (allows you to rotate a photo without losing the perspective quality), and the back up/revert feature.  I love knowing that however much playing around I do with a photo, that I’ll always have the original.

How many of these cool fixes would I use?  The Quick Fix took care of pretty much everything that I needed as far as editing my photos, I used the Lossless Rotation feature for nearly all of my architectural shots, and I used the Revert feature frequently.  The other features, while very cool and fun, were probably not ones that I’d use often.

Share:  After spending the time organizing and fixing some of my photos, you darn well know that I wanted people to see what I’d done.  This is the bragging rights part of the deal!  You can save photos as a screen saver or desktop and email to friends, of course.  And I did a fair amount of that, getting lots of compliments.  BUT – those things are so pedestrian compared to some of the other features.

There is an automated process to share your photos with Facebook and Flickr, so you don’t need to convert them or upload them individually.  If you’re a high volume user of either of these services, this feature will save you tons of time!

You can also put together some pretty cool slide shows (using a wizard), adding music and other special features.  I didn’t do too well at that, but I made a good start at it.  I really like the feature that allows you to upload your slide shows to YouTube in one step rather than having to mess with a bunch of conversion stuff, which, face it, I would never do.  I had hoped to have this feature perfected so that I could include my slide show in this review post, but it’s going to take me a bit more time and practice.  You’ll eventually see one though!

There were also some of the standard type of features regarding photo printing, making photo CD’s and other photo projects.

So how does Digital Photo Suite stack up against the other photo editing programs out there?

It’s a bit of a mixed bag.

Many of the tools and features offered are no different than what you’ll find in a lot of FREE programs.  Some of the other features can be found in the pay-version of the FREE photo programs.  Those pay-versions are going to run you about $25/year, so the price tag of Digital Photo Suite pays for itself in two years.  Updates and fixes are included.  If you are a regular user of some of the enhanced features, however, the time savings will be well worth the software price tag.  A bit trite but true – if you’re going to use it, it’s worth the price.

If you are skilled at photo editing, Digital Photo Suite probably won’t offer you a whole lot that’s worth paying for.  That’s fine.  But if you’re like me, someone who needs to get organized and do something (anything?) with photos that have been collecting for far too long, I think this is a good option.  The time saved in uploading to flickr and Facebook would mount up quickly.  And when I learn to do slide shows and upload to YouTube, I’ll have an additional multimedia option to include with blog posts.

Saving time is (convenience) is worth this price tag for me.  I’d recommend reviewing your skills, needs, time, and motivation to organize your photos.  Only then can you decide if the price tag balances things out for you.