For fabulous results Photoshop is fabulous

Two years ago, our grade-schooler had to create a timeline, complete with photographs, showcasing all the highlights of her very young life. In the end, we proudly displayed a composite of all her "firsts"--first dance recital, first day of school, First Holy Communion, etc. The road to this masterpiece, however, was a nightmare for us. The reason? Our photos are a disaster. We envy our friends who have every picture ever taken in neatly labeled albums, all in order, on easily-accessible bookshelves. We had a giant box, with years worth of shots, still in the envelopes from the developer.

When this project was all over, we took a deep breath, and gave ourselves the very generous deadline of two years to get our act together and finally organize our very precious memories. Well, now our next child is in third grade and--guess what?--we still have the box, only today it's larger, and the project is due next week. Surprisingly, though, we're really having a good time putting this one together.

We finally got smart and enlisted the help of Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0, a program that lets us find, edit, and share our photos. We've uploaded our recent digital photos, called up our old photo CDs, and even scanned our older photographs and organized them all into albums which we've given labels such as "Skiing in Vermont" or "Florida Vacation."

Aside from the fact that we now can find our pictures, what's great is how versatile the program is. Of course, we can crop and resize the shots, but we also have the ability to correct imperfections, such as erasing a small blemish on a cheek, or removing a garbage can from our beautiful beach scene. We can create cards or group photos together to make a collage for our scrapbooks with many backgrounds, borders, and frames to choose from. We easily can remove red eye, lighten or darken shadows, enhance color or contrast, etc. The list is endless. It is so simple to use, and the end results make us look like professionals.

We can't wait to get started on our next project. With Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0, we're going to take all those hours of home videos--that even Grandma gets bored watching--and turn them into Hollywood-style productions.

Each product is available nationwide at major electronics stores for $99, or as a bundle, for $149. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning