Dave Peters raves over Photoshop 

Adobe is great - and David Peters makes some excellent video courses on Photoshop - I have bought and used them. (Click here to find out about 'Learn Photoshop Now" )

But when it comes to making photo albums Photoshop is not the best - especially if you do not need all of the effects that Adobe provides.

The king of photo album programs is dg Foto Art. It is exceptionally good for wedding and celebratory albums. The Gold version has many of the features of CS3 - and to an excellent standard. It is also very easy to use - available from OPUSalbums. (See http://www.opusalbums.com/dgfoto. One drawback is that it does not have inbuilt ICC profiles (these are coming shortly I understand) - but you can use them in the printer driver. However one wedding photographer said “I can do as much in an hour with dg Foto Art as I did in a day with Photoshop”.

For family albums I recommend ACD’s Fotoslate4. It is very good and flexible for album layout and is much easier to add text elements than with dg Foto Art. It’s editing capabilities are limited. For example to do a background you need to take a photo - lighten it, do a gaussian blur in Photoshop and then use the result. But it is no big deal. Fotoslate4 is also avaialble from OPUSalbums.com - see http://www.opusalbums.com/fotoslate4

Any comments - please feel free to contact me - daniel@opusalbums.com

Daniel Roberts
OPUSalbums.com