Adobe Photodeluxe is Adobe’s affordable image processing software. Don’t be fooled by the word affordable, because this program is packed with features. Granted it doesn’t have all the features and filters in the $500 programs, but unless you are doing professional publishing you won’t miss them. Photodeluxe will have all you need and more.

Ease of use

This is a difficult program to use. If you are new to manipulating digital images and want a program to take “red eye” out of pictures, I wouldn’t recommend this program. This program does the basics like removing “red eye” and much more, but it takes some time to learn all the features. It took me about a month to really understand the program and use the more sophisticated features. Once I figured out what all the features do and how the selection tools work, the program is somewhat easier to use.

Features

As I mentioned earlier, this program is packed with features. Your imagination is the limit to what you can do with your photos. Here are some of the tools I use most often:

-Adjust colors. This allows you to globally adjust the colors in the picture. When you select this feature, the program shows you the current picture and how it would look six different ways by adding more blue, green, yellow, red, cyan, or magenta.

-Artistic. This function provides effects like sponging and colored pencil. In other words it attempts to show your picture as if it was drawn with a colored pencil or sponge.

-Blur. This function as the name says, will blur the object to make it look like it is moving when the picture was taken.

-Distort. There are several different options on how to distort your photo. You can choose to put a ripple through the photo just like you would see a ripple on a lake. Or you could choose to make the photo circular with the distortion.

-Extensis Intellifix. This function takes analyzes your photo and makes automatic adjustments to fine tune your picture. I’ve found that this function makes my pictures better about 75% of the time. Intellifix adjusts the brightness, color, and saturation to the optimal levels.

-Noise. This function will add dust and specs to your photo. If you want to make your picture look like it was taken years ago, this is a easy way to do it.

-Pixelate. This function takes apart your photo at the finest level adds an effect then puts it back together. For instance, the mosaic effect will make your picture look like it was put together with tiles.

-Sharpen. This function allows you to set the level of sharpness in your photo, similar to the sharpness function on your TV. Basically, it will enhance the edges slightly and adjust the contrast to provide your image to stand out better.

-Cloning. This is one of my favorite functions. This allows you to copy certain areas of a photo to another area at the pixel level. Works great for taking away areas that you don’t want by copying over it from other good parts in the picture.

Projects

The one easy part of this program is the projects section. Here you can make a greeting card, calendar, certificate, specialized labels, or add a nice frame to your picture.

What makes this so easy is the wizard function. For instance, lets make a calendar. The wizard will ask you for the month and year. Next the program will ask what picture you want to put on it. After a few selections, you will have a really nice calendar to impress the family and friends. If you want to make it a little more artistic, spend some more time using some of the functions I wrote above.

Bottom Line

This is an extremely powerful program for a small price. You can manipulate photos into almost anything imaginable. However, there is a steep learning curve to master all the effects.

Thanks for reading!




Recommended: Yes