Spice Up Your Photos

Once upon a time, there was a program called Kai's Photo Soap. I can remember it like a dream, so beautiful, yet gone...discontinued and abandoned, to be more specific. Well, life is life, and most things that appear before their time end up the way they shouldn't.

What I have here now is a program that reminds me somehow of Photo Soap, but although it is released almost eight years later, it's still behind that old goldie. Anyway, this is not a compared review, so let's leave the past where it belongs and look into the future.

The subject is called Photo Show and has just reached the version numbered 2.0. What I have here is a 5 days trial of this 19.95$ program and I got it shaped as an install package that weighs 3MB. The setup process goes away like dust in the wind, and soon you'll find yourself facing the program's interface and ready to explore its features...

Photo Show has a good interface that has cute icons, is easy to use and well organized. There are four main elements to be noticed here - the main menu, the toolbar, the Photo Preview and the Templates List & Edit panel.

Now, let's see what can be done with this program...

Of course that everything starts with the opening of an existing picture, and I noticed that you can load an impressive amount of file types into Photo Show. The list is too long to write it down here, but you should know that you can open Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro documents, Paintbrush images or TIFF files.

Once the file is loaded into the Photo Preview area, you can perform six operations. Adding text and performing basic image adjustments are the first two things to do, and you can find them in a lot of other programs. The fun part that includes work with the built in objects starts when using the four remaining tools. Image masks, frames, clip arts and shadows. This is it! All you have to do is drag them from the Templates List panel to the Photo Preview window and it's done!

The trial version has only a few templates available to use, but after you register, you get access to a library of over two hundred objects. Until then, you have five days for a free trial, so why not start now?

The Good

Photo Show is a small, cute and easy to use program that brings back pleasant memories. Everyone should be able to use it, and its price is fair enough for me.

The Bad

The Help file could be more detailed, although this is such a simple program, and the trial version would be much better with file save disallowed but more templates available.

The Truth

Professional designers may consider this program a joke, but most people love good jokes, and Photo Show is not far from being one...a good joke for designers, and a pretty useful program for the rest of us.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: