PS Album Starter

By Andrew Begg

Photoshop Album Starter Edition is a cousin to the well known Photoshop application. It is mainly meant for use to cataloguing your photographs. As we begin to collect those literally thousands of images, it becomes increasingly important to be able to retrieve a certain picture at a moment’s notice.

You have the ability so sort your pictures by date, or by tagging. Tagging allows you to place each of your pictures in a category. Categories include: People, Places, Events and Other, but you can create your own additional categories as you need them.

With date view, you are able to select a specific day, and watch a slideshow of your pictures shot that day. Once correctly installed, PS Album, will detect when your camera or media card is connected to your PC, and will transfer your images to your hard drive, into a folder named after the date/time of the import (transfer).

PS Album will support JPEG and AVI (for those people who shoot video clips), but not RAW. For RAW, one will need something a bit more advanced. When your images have been transferred, and catalogued, you have the option of performing basic corrections to your image. Under the General Fixes Category, you may fix colour, levels, saturation and contrast. Additionally, red eye removal is possible, as well as image cropping.

The final task is printing, which you can do directly from PS Album. Unfortunately, the variety of printing options is limited as we tend to use A4 size paper in this country, and the majority of the printing options are intended for use with the US standard “letter” size paper.

The great thing about PS Album is its price: it is free to download from the Adobe Web Site, and after registration, the program is yours.