I'm finally going to get around to creating a CD ROM of my motor pool gallery and other sundry photos like some military museum vehicle shots. Can anyone suggest a program readily available and not too expensive.

I'd like to do something a little fancier than just having folders burned to a CD. I do have the standard MS Office programs like Front Page, PowerPoint, Word, Access, Excel.

Any suggestions appreciated.

Rob,

I have used jasc's Paint Shop Pro for years. I think it's up to version 8 now. To be honest, my wife is the photo editor, which you can see by the poor condition of some of the pics in my gallery. The most I usually do is crop or resize pics. But my wife does a lot of fine tuning of her pics, and she swears by it. It has been called the poor man's photoShop. It can even use some of PhotoShop's filters. The PX should carry it for less than $100.00.

Chuck

Rob I have Adobe Photo Shop and find it easy to use. In fact I would not use anything else now. I do not know what it is cost wise but it is good to use.

Rob,

As for the program you need, it really depends on a lot what you have in mind. I do photo work and use photoshop everyday and love it, but it is expensive and has many, many tools that aren't remotely necessary for everyday photo editing.

One option is Photoshop Elements, which is mainly the basic photo manipulation tools from Photoshop and it can be found for a fair price.

As mentioned, jasc's paint shop pro is a good program. I've used it for design work, but not tried it on photos.

Another option which I've heard good things about, although haven't used, is gimp.

http://www.gimp.org/

The biggest advantage with it is that is is free to download. I've heard it come highly recommended.

Anything I can help you with, feel free to ask and I'd be more than happy to give you what answers I can.

My Dell comes with Paint Shop Pro 7.05 already installed. I've never used it, and just started the program. I am about a year beyond my 30 day free trial period. Wonder if I should click the "buy' link and activate it?

One of the things I want to do is to offer these CDs to modelers. I want them to be able to easily access the photos on the CD. If I creat an album with these programs, will a user without the program be able to open and browse the photos?

Rob,
it should be simple to share the CD's.
The images on them,once you have tweaked them,should be .JPEG format.All computers can read this format.
Photo editors are good fro sharpening,resizing and color correcting.Then after all that is done,you have a new cleaned up ,file. In Jpeg format.very easy to burn and share.

Rob,
I've never created a CD album. Let me dig out the manual and I will get back to you.
Chuck

Rob,
I just looked through the Paint Shop Pro 8 manual and there is no feature specificly to creat albums. But as Carl said, once the pics are edited and saved as JPEG's anyone should be able to view them. I don't know if a Mac can easily read a PC data disk (Anyone?)

I, for one, would buy a CD based version of the Motorpool. I like the idea of being able to referrence pics off-line. I think it would go over very well.

PSP8 is an excellent editor, so I can highly reccomend it.

HTH
Chuck

Rob

I've never tried it myself, so I don't know how much work it would involve, but you could use Frontpage to create a Webpage layout for the CD. Users could click through the albums and pictures as if accesing a website like Armorama.

As I said before, I've never done any web editing, so perhaps someone with more knowledge than I on this subject could provide some idea of how difficult / time-consuming this would be?

Cheers
Ed

re: Doing a the photos like a Web page

One of the handy things in photoshop is that it will automatically create Web galleries for you. Even if you did your editing and organization in another program you could have someone with Photoshop take those and create the galleries.
They're a little generic, but it's quick and simple. I use them all the time for display purpose so people can browse through photos.

If there's no one nearby who could do it, I'll gladly volunteer to help out with things like that. Any needs help, feel free to ask.

Rob,
if you want to create something easyly readable other people, I think the best choice is to create web albums.
Try to have a look at [url=http://www.snapfiles.com/downloadfind.php?action=s&st=web+album&search=Find]this link/url]. It will take you to a selection of freeware and shareware software to create web albums. Usually they resize the picture to web resolution too if you wish.
Ciao