A REVIEW OF ASHAMPOO PHOTO COMMANDER 9

OVERVIEW

Photo Commander is designed to manage, edit, present, and optimize your digital photographs and videos. This product's many tools are bundled together into one easy-to-use package. Photo Commander 9 requires Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7.

Everyone who uses a digital camera requires a Photo Manager. It's a hard sell, however, because you probably already own software of this type. Your operating system, for example, is capable of loading and displaying photographs. Also, when you purchased your digital camera, it came with software designed to display and, in many cases, edit your collection of pictures. Hopefully this review will provide enough information to allow you to decide whether Photo Commander can improve your experience with digital photography.

PURCHASE AND INSTALLATION

I downloaded the product from the Ashampoo website. Ashampoo is an international software company based in Germany. Photo Commander 9 can be purchased or downloaded on a trial basis. Older versions can sometimes be purchased for less or obtained for free.

Installation was simple and straightforward. I chose the custom method to avoid installing their toolbar. The normal trial period is ten days, but Ashampoo automatically sent me a license key extending the trial to forty days.

THE TEST DRIVE

The software added an icon to my desktop. A double-click brought up a welcoming screen allowing me to choose what I wanted to do. I decided to View/Organize Photos/Videos.

This is where I hang out. Every tool can be accessed from this screen. To left, a tree structure is used to locate photographs. Above the tree, I noticed the label Calendar. Clicking this brings up a series of dates. When a date is clicked, only the photographs taken/scanned on that day (or month) are displayed.

The right side of the screen contains thumbnails of pictures selected from the tree. A photograph can be enlarged by double-clicking the thumbnail. The menubar at the top can be accessed to manipulate the photograph in various ways. I'm going to discuss the important features of each menu.

FILE

This contains normal functions such as saving , deleting , and sending the picture by e-mail. One feature I like allows displayed photograph to be opened by an outside program. I set it up to open my favorite editing software, Corel Photo Paint.

EDIT

These tools are used to edit the displayed image. The editing features of Photo Commander are no match for Adobe Photoshop or Corel Photo Paint , but they are quite good. It took months to become confident in my ability to use Photo Paint but, with this product there is almost no learning curve - most of the tools are automatic. I selected the Quick Fix tools - Optimize Color/Contrast Automatically . When I attempted to save the result, I was presented with the choice of either overwriting the original or saving the edited photograph under a new name.

Photo commander features a cloning tool. When working with scanned photographs, a clone brush is useful for hiding dust and fold lines as well as repairing tears. The tool worked well enough although I was unable to adjust the brush size.

VIEW

An image can be zoomed from this screen. The photographs can also be sorted/grouped in various ways. One feature, new in this edition, allows for comparison between the original image and an edited version. This is a foolproof method of determining which editing processes are useful for a particular image.

SLIDESHOW

this is where a slideshow can be configured and displayed.

TOOLS

From here, a series of images can be selected and manipulated. Perhaps, for example, they were originally taken with the camera turned sideways. Convert Photos could be used to rotate these pictures by ninety degrees. This would be much quicker than rotating each photograph separately. There are several other useful batch tools included in this program.

A separate set of tools are available for creating a Web Photo Album, Calendar, Collage , or Panorama . Slide-shows can be created and burned to a DVD/CD, and a photograph can be designated as computer's desktop wallpaper . Images inserted into this article were grabbed from Photo Commander by the screen capture tool .

CONFIGURATION

This menu allows for the change of certain settings.

MY ASHAMPOO

Updates can be accessed here. Normally, however, update notifications are displayed when the program is opened. The Ashampoo website can also be reached from this menu.

HELP

E-mail support can be found under this menu. Note that Ashampoo does not provide telephone support.

The Welcome screen , generated when the program opens, contains several options. These consist of View/Organize Photos/Videos, Edit an Image, Scan an Image, Create, Capture a Window/Desktop, and Organize . After a couple of days, I realized everything can be run from the main window and disabled the welcome screen.

FINAL CONCLUSION

Photo management programs are required to perform many functions. Photography collections can be extensive and it is important to arrange individual images in a logical order. When opened, the thumbnails must load quickly and be large enough for easy identification. While no one expects software in this price range to compete against professional editors such as Adobe Photoshop, they must contain a decent suite of editing tools. The creation of slideshows that can be copied to CD, and the ability to capture screenshots are expected to be standard features.

Ashampoo Photo Commander meets all of these requirements. Its strength is the ability to break every task into a series of easy-to-follow steps. For someone as simple-minded as myself, this is the ideal Photo Managing suite. It has my recommendations.