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PhotoFactory
from ScanSoft
$29.95
Review by Gary Coyne
So, you've purchased a digital camera and/or a scanner and have been loading hundreds of pictures of Aunt Maud holding your dog Fred and you realize that Aunt Maud has the same facial expression whether she's happy, mad, or bored. Or you have a picture of your boss that you want to spice up and share around the office. Or, you've just gotten your iMac with a 10 Gb hard drive and you haven't yet filled up the first Gig.
In each of these cases, you want PhotoFactory.
PhotoFactory is a collection of three different programs:
- Kai's Power SHOW™. A program that helps you create slide shows of your photographs. Fancy dissolves, frames, and backgrounds can be accompanied by voice annotations, sound effects, and music. This program is sort of a PowerPoint for pictures.
- Kai's Photo Soap 2. Kai's approach to Photoshop, this program can help you retouch, repair, add text and create digital photo albums for your photos.
- Kai's SuperGOO™. Time to go crazy and distort a photo with realtime liquid distortion effects that can be saved in a photo format or in a Quicktime/AVI presentation.
A complete install of PhotoFactory will help you fill your (nearly) empty hard drive with 948.4 Megs of Kai-stuff (100 Meg minimum install). At the price, it has to be one of the best deals on the computer market. Either that or ScanSoft is in collusion with hard drive manufacturers. Admittedly, the vast majority of "stuff" placed on your hard drive are the many sounds, backgrounds, and other graphic effects that can be added to a picture, slide show, or photo album. The programs themselves are not all that big and do not require an extensive amount of RAM to run.
My biggest problem with all these programs is that they are not MultiFinder compatible. That is, once you start these programs up, you loose access to any other program on your computer including the Finder. (If you click the top of the screen of a screen just the right way, you can get your way to the drop-down program menu on the top right. Alternatively, with PowerSHOW or PhotoSoap 2, the on-line help is provided in Adobe Acrobat. So, as soon as you access help, you then have easy access to the rest of your computer.) My other problem with these programs is that they took the Apple interface rules and said "think different." So there is nothing for you to expect once you open the programs. Everything is different. Start a program, and you're in the world of Kai. Get ready to hunt, peck, and hack around.
All that notwithstanding, let's look at the programs.
PowerSHOW
Kai's PowerSHOW allows you to create photo "shows" of your photos. You can add sounds (supplied) or your own. You can add backgrounds, edges, frames, and a host of graphics to place your photos upon. (It takes things like this to help fill up the almost 1 GB of stuff onto your hard drive.)
The above screen shot shows how PowerSHOW filled up my 20 inch monitor. In an interesting metaphor, pictures brought into the program appear as small thumbnails one can drag around the screen as one would on a rug. Once the photos you want are collected, you can marque around the photos you want to work with and then click on the Quickshow button on the bottom. Here is where you select your options for how your presentation is to be shown.
All of these are variable by clicking on the choices and once done, one selects "Do It!!" One can also create "standalone" programs for PC or Macs so the program is not required for those you wish to subject to your summer vacation.
PhotoSoap 2
If you take a lot of digital photographs and/or save all your photographs digitally, there's a lot to be said about the ability to save them in digital photographic albums. Otherwise, saving scads of photos in folders is not unlike saving your photos in a drawer--you have them, but they are mostly unavailable.
PhotoSoap has the most "Mac" interface of the three, but that doesn't mean much as there still is a large contingent of icons you have to figure out and general interface peculiarities. On the bottom of the screen is a place to "store" your pictures as you touch them up, alter, and/or fix problems. I tried to fix some "white eye" (dog version of human red eye), but it didn't seem to work. However, it worked just fine on a human red eye. Apparently it's keyed to fix only the bright red of red eye meaning that you can't smear a color correction. This is good unless you want to fix a dog's white eye. Below is a screen shot of PhotoSoap.
Once you have your photo cleaned up, one of the options is to create a photo album. See the example below (I didn't take the time to annotate each photo). Once collected, you can save the entire document as an html file of all your photos, including the book (or whatever album format you choose) and upload it to a web site.
The help (in an Acrobat pdf document) is not very helpful in explaining how to prepare photos for the web, although it does an OK job of explaining why one should. Unfortunately, the way the program works, the process is rather backwards in how one prepares the photos and the albums, and unless you know what to look (hack) for, there are some important steps one can miss. Thus, through no fault of the user, many pictures that should be reduced in size (to a lower jpeg resolution) will be uploaded as is. Because of this, many people will be waiting long periods for pictures to download to their computer (not to mention spending inordinate amount of time uploading the pictures to the server in the first place).
SuperGOO
Without a doubt, SuperGOO is the one of the three programs that people will want to play with first. And of the three, it's probably the one that is least "Mac" like. Also, since you cannot access the Adobe Acrobat help file from within the program, once started you cannot get out till you quit. To quit, by the way, is Command-Q. I remind you of this as there doesn't seem to be any place on the screen to click or select via the mouse to quit the program.
What you can do with SuperGOO is to take a picture and mess it up. Below is a before and after of one of my corgis, Albee.
The good news is that no animals were hurt in the preparation of these pictures.
There are two parts of SuperGOO: the Fusion Room where you can mix and match face parts, add face parts and (in the end result) fuse face parts around all over the place. There is also the GOO room, displayed above, with two different types of effects: The GOO Brush palette (used above on Albee) where you can push, pull, shrink, enlarge, and generally mess up a picture and the GOO Effects palette where you can perform swirls and a variety of kaleidoscope type of effects on a picture. Once completed, you can save in a variety of common graphic formats or print the photo.
I should point out that some of the GOO effects are now part of Adobe's Photoshop 6.
Summary
In short, I didn't care for these programs. If your need or interest is to store your photos in catalogues, there are both shareware and commercial programs that may not be as fancy, may not provide as many options, but they don't fill your hard drive with copious amounts of stuff. Some of these programs also provide various slide show options if you want to see your photos change on the screen (albeit not with cute sound effects).
SuperGOO is fun to play with, but only in the GOO Room. I found the Fusion Room generally boring (and this area hogs essentially all the disk occupying baggage for the GOO program (321 MB) of the program's (339 MB total)). The GOO room is fun, but limited. After all, how often can you call your spouse or friends over to "Hey, look at this!!"
On the other hand, if you have extra hard disk space and you've got the time to play, there are few other programs you can buy for your computer for $30 and get this amount of bang for your buck.
___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.
Tags: Reviews ď Graphics/Design ď
