I'm a web developer. Graphics play a large role in the design of most web sites, so it's nice to have a collection of photographs to choose from when you're building a site.

If you want some great pictures, ease of use, and a quality product, DO NOT use PrintMaster Deluxe! This product is bad on so many levels, I'll break it up so you can see just how bad it is.

You want me to install what?
PrintMaster Deluxe 7.0 comes with 5 CDs. At first, I was excited. An Install CD, a Program CD, and 3 Art CDs. 3 CDs with 650 megs of storage on each one, that's nearly 2 Gigs of photos! Well, you'd think so. To be honest, I don't know how many photos there are, because I have never seen all of them at once.

In order to use PrintMaster Deluxe, you have to install a program appropriately called Print Master. It also installs a TWAIN program to let you set up a scanner, and several useless items like an event calendar and a link to set up AT&T internet service. If I wanted a calendar or internet service, I'd get them myself. I don't want my software trying to get me to sign up for their brand of internet or giving me useless tools.

Then the program installs Serif Draw Plus 3.0, a low quality image editing tool. You would be much better off downloading Paint Shop Pro and using the trial version, then buying the full version for under $100. Support shareware, buy the programs you use.

That's a lot of useless junk just to get the PrintMaster software installed. The install took about 10 minutes on a PII 700 with 128megs of ram. Lots of wasted time I could have been building web sites.

OK, show me the pictures
With many of the stock photograph or clip art collections I have used, the CDs contained the files you would use in a standard file format. You could browse the CD and open any file you wanted in your regular image editing software.

This is not the case with PrintMaster. You have to look at the images using the PrintMaster software. They are not stored as any normal type of file on the CD, they can only be viewed through the poor quality program that they come with.

To make matters worse, you Must have the program CD in the CD Rom drive in order to use the photography. It is annoying to have to dig out the extra CD when you have already installed so many programs. If I have to take up hard drive space with these sub-standard programs, I don't expect to have to use the CD too, but with PrintMaster, you do.

OK, NOW show me the photos!
You're not done yet. Once you open the program, you are given a blank file to work with. You have to tell the program you want to add a picture. It then opens up a sub window with lots of tiny thumbnail views of pictures.

Each thumbnail has a title like "Industrial Area" or "House with Bugs", but these descriptions are fairly useless, and don't tell you much about the photo. Where is the industrial area? What kind of bugs? You just have to guess.

The thumbnails are so small and of such poor quality it is impossible to get more than a general idea about each image. So if you want to see what color the house is, or if that smear in front of it is a tree or a person, you have to open the file.

At this point, the program tells you to remove the Program CD, and insert one of the Image CDs. After pressing "OK" several times to get the disk to register, and waiting a few more seconds for the program to find the image, it pops up in your Print Master program.

Great, I have the picture, now I want to edit it
Not in this program you don't. The tools in Print Master are very limited and clunky. If you have ever used a real image editing program, you will be very disapointed. Maybe if you have never seen a computer before, this would impress you. Maybe if you're 95 and can't see well this would be acceptable. If you know anything about desktop publishing or graphic design, you'll be disgusted.

You can draw some lines and simple shapes, there's a basic text box, and lots of cheesy features like borders and cute phrases you can put on your picture, but nothing you would want to use on a project for work. Kids 5 and younger might think it's cute though.

Even worse, you cannot easily take these pictures and use them in another image editing software. There's no cut and paste, so you have to take a screen shot and then paste that into your editor. What a waste of time.

All the time in the world
And it just keeps wasting your time. If you want to use another picture, you have to take the Photo CD out, put the Program CD back, select the tiny thumbnail, then take the Program CD back out, and put the Image CD back in. Now you have a second image in your worthless image editing software. Yippie!

If you plan on making any kind of design that involves more than one or two images, plan on plenty of wasted time switching disks, and staring at the screen. I found myself getting closer and closer to the monitor trying to figure out what was in each image. You don't want to open an image that isn't exactaly what you want, because you waste so much time switching disks that you hate to have to look for another one.

Maybe the quality's worth the trouble!
Maybe not. In fact, not at all!

The images are quite small, most were your standard 3.5" x 5" photographs. If you try to use one of these to make a poster or even spread it across a normal piece of paper, the picture will look horrible. The composition and image quality was sub standard too.

The lighting was often poor, some pictures had too many things going on, or lots of people in front of buildings, and I found one image that had the glowing red number date and time stamp that you often see with point and shoot cameras! If that isn't a perfect example of unprofessional work, I don't know what is.

Please, don't EVER use this
I hate this product. I cannot believe that any company would be allowed to sell such sub-standard garbage. If you want an image editor, get something else. If you want clip art, find it online. If you want stock photos, get a better program. Under no circumstances should anyone ever use this product!



Recommended: No