The Digital Darkroom

Over the last couple of years, it’s become fairly easy to get photographs into and out of your personal computer. Digital cameras can transfer pictures directly to a PC, color scanners can be used to input existing pictures, and many photo labs will now put images onto a CD when they process the film.

But regardless of how you get the photos into the PC, you’ll still need some software to clean them up, enhance them and crop and re-size them.

There are now several home photo-editing programs on the market that do all this and more. All the ones I looked at have more than enough functionality to turn almost any decent digital image into a pretty-good-looking photo.

They also succumb to the trend among home software designers to create cute, “friendly” interfaces that make these programs prettier but not necessarily easier to use. Some are much better than others, but each has strayed from the familiar Macintosh and Windows interface that most computer users have already mastered.

Adobe, which publishes Adobe PhotoShop, the editing program of choice for graphic professionals, also makes a program for the rest of us: Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2.0 (Windows or Mac, $49).

It not only cleans up pictures, it can also be used to create greeting cards, banners, calendars and other projects. You can even use the program to create a Halloween mask with instructions you’ll find on Adobe’s Web site (https://www.adobe.com).

The program is organized by task, with titles such as “Get Photo,” “Special Effects,” “Cards and More” and “Internet.” As with all the photo-editing programs, you can use the software to open a file from a disk or to interface with a scanner or digital camera.

PhotoDeluxe’s special-effects options are particularly fun. The art option, for example, lets you make your photo look old-fashioned or give it the feel of an impressionist painting.

In an effort to keep it easy to understand, the program requires that you go through a series of steps for each process. I found that to be time-consuming and a bit tedious. Nevertheless, I got good results. Thanks to PhotoDeluxe, one of my relatives no longer has a gap between her teeth, at least in one picture.

PhotoDeluxe’s interface is a lot easier to understand than the one in Photo Creations All-in-One Studio from Creative Wonders (Windows, $49.99). The authors of that program, in an apparent effort to be folksy, created an opening screen that looks a bit like a home office.

There is a wall safe where you “lock up your creations,” a bookshelf to store what you create, and a “new project generator” that you click on to “start a new creation.”

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All of these images are impeccably illustrated, but they’re not intuitive. I was impressed when I saw the program demonstrated but annoyed when I tried to use it. It seems more like a children’s discovery game than a creativity program. Give me an old-fashioned Windows file menu and I’ll figure out how to use just about any program without opening a manual.

Once you get used to the interface, you discover that Photo Creations has lots of great features, including the ability to create cards, calendars, newsletters, albums, invitations, announcements and photo albums that you can share over the Internet. The program also lets you record your own voice, import home movies and capture single frames from video.

Soap (Windows or Mac, $49) from MetaTools also has a nontraditional user interface, but I was able to get used to it. The innovative program is organized into “rooms” where you do your photo-processing.

The theory behind this user interface, according to the manual, is to provide “a simple set of tasks and the rooms in which to do them.” Each room takes over the entire screen and, unlike most other Mac and Windows programs, there are no familiar pull-down menus.

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Once you get it, Soap is a cinch to use because it breaks down the process of photo editing into a series of simple tasks. The “in room” lets you open files, scan photos and create albums. The “prep room” is where you crop, re-size and rotate photos. The “tone room” lets you adjust the brightness and contrast of your photos by using any of three sliders.

A “color room” is for adjusting hue, saturation and lightness, and the “detail room” is where you can smooth and sharpen images, remove “red eye,” and “heal” blemishes and other imperfections on your photos. Finally, in the “finish room,” you can dress up your image with backgrounds, edges, textures and objects.

My only major complaint about the program is that the full installation takes up nearly 70 megabytes of hard disk space. You can pare it down to 20, but you don’t get the full functionality.

Microsoft Picture It 2.0 (Windows 95, $49), like Adobe PhotoDeluxe, is project-oriented. But I found the program easier to use because the steps needed to complete a project are obvious, and there are relatively few of them.

The program lets you bring in and manipulate multiple graphic images to create a “collage” that can consist of photos or text. You can easily add fancy text to any project, and a “paint and color effects” button lets you paint anything on the image you’re editing.

There are plenty of special-effect as well as automatic tools for cleaning up photos--a “fix red eye” command, for example, and others that let you create cutouts of people and other objects. Pictures can be sent to others via e-mail but, unlike Photo Creations, the program doesn’t let you create a Web page.

LivePix 1.1 (Windows or Mac, $49.95) from LivePix has all the usual photo-editing and special-project tools, along with a really neat feature that lets you drop your image into background scenes. It took a bit of doing, but I was able to superimpose my son in front of the Golden Gate Bridge.

It would be relatively easy to create a photo with me standing next to, say, the Queen of England. Its “stick on disguise” feature lets my son, Will, create a picture of himself as a muscle man or sporting purple hair. Parents might urge their teenagers to simulate body piercing and tattoos before opting for the real thing.

You can download a free 30-day trial version of the program at https://www.livepix.com

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Lawrence J. Magid can be reached via e-mail at magid@latimes.com. His Web page is at https://www.larrysworld.com