Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
You can make an image fill a page (a great advantage over other, more restrictive scrapbooking
programs that squeeze photos into tiny spaces) and ensure that it retains its
proper aspect ratio.
Color-editing features are available in the Enhanced and Extreme editions, but are very
limited in the Essentials program. Notably absent are the thousands of clipart images,
embellishments, and fonts that are common in many scrapbooking programs. Arguably
these are two-a-penny, with many available free online, and there is nothing to stop you
adding any image in JPEG format to your FotoFusion pages.
Comments
Although LumaPix FotoFusion Essentials does not go far beyond making collages, it is
a true scrapbooking tool that has become the focus of an industry consortium called
the dotScrap Alliance (www.dotScrap.com). This imaginative business venture ties in
physical scrapbooking tools and materials with digital creation, under the banner “All
the Fun, None of the Fuss.” Participating companies, besides Lumapix, are All My
Memories, Autumn Leaves, Creative Imaginations, Daisy D’s, DMD, K & Company,
KI Memories, L’il Davis Designs, LineCo, Rastar, Scrapbook.com, Scrapjazz.com, SEI,
and Westrim. None of this would have been possible if FotoFusion was not a first-rate
tool, able to produce original and satisfying layouts with great ease of use.
At the time of writing there is no Macintosh version of LumaPix FotoFusion, although
it runs in VMWare and Parallels mode on Intel Macs. Nonetheless, the Extreme version
is the only product in this chapter that is highly rated by professionals. For example, top
wedding photographer David A. Ziser (www.davidziser.com), who teaches digital master
classes in Ohio, tells me informally that it’s “the best design software on the planet
Earth.” A subjective judgment? Possibly. But it clearly helps him get the job done.
Version: FotoFusion 4.2 (2008)
OS: Windows 2000, XP, and Vista
RAM: 256MB
Supported file formats: JPEG, BMP, TIFF, PNG, GIF, PSD, and PDF
Price level: Essentials version $40, Enhanced version $120, Extreme version $300
Address: LumaPix, 195 Louis-Lalande, Boucherville, QC, J4B 6P6, Canada
www.lumapix.com
Hallmark Scrapbook Studio
Vendor: Creative Home
Purpose: Scrapbooking software with templates, graphics, fonts, and a photo editor