Software Review of:
MGI Photosuite 4 
Platinum Edition 

System requirements are as follows. Operating Systems: Windows 95/98/ME, NT 4.0 (SP3), or Windows 2000 and Internet Explorer 5. Computer: Pentium 166 MMX minimum (Pentium II-266 MHz recommended), 32 MB RAM, SVGA Video Card, 800x600 screen, 24-bit True Color (2MB Video RAM), 200 MB Hard Drive space plus space for IE 5 and Direct X. Accessories: Mouse, CD-ROM Drive, 28.8 K modem for access to the Internet, Color Printer and scanner or Digital Camera. Due to upgrading, my computer exceeds all requirements with the exception of the processor and my processor is the original 266-MHz Pentium II.

At my niece’s wedding in March I took a lot of pictures – 53 in all. Taking pictures at the moment in a large, rather dark cathedral resulted in a lot of pictures that were too dark to see the subject and almost every picture had red eye. I set out with my new software to correct the problems. Photosuite is so user friendly that usually you only need to click once on the touchup that is needed and the software does it for you. I used the enhancement tool on all of the pictures and it helped on many of them but not on all of the pictures. As an example, the picture of the alter enhanced (lightened) so that it became a beautiful picture, while a picture of a bridesmaid did not appear to lighten at all when enhanced. Another button within touchup is the red eye removal and this is a real dream to use. A click of the zoom tool takes you directly to the red eye and then it is a simple click and it is removed. MGI has one of the easiest red eye removals that I have ever used. 

The activities under prepare your picture include rotate and crop, touchup, cutouts, paint and draw, special effects, stitching and photo tapestry. Rotating a picture is clickably easy as is cropping a picture. I have touched on the touchup phase of Photosuite already. Cutouts are available in the form of a rectangle, ellipse, freehand, magic wand, edge finder or other cutouts that you may add. With any of the choices you then have tools that are very much like the tools in the Paint program that comes with Windows. Paint and draw also has the same tools as the Paint program. I found special effects to be my favorite ways to change a picture. It has warp tools that are fun but the most fun is in the area called effects. You can take any picture and make it look like fog, glass, snow, and/or wind. I could not resist taking a picture of San Quentin and setting it under a blanket of snow. The Print option in MGI permits you to print a single photo or multiples of a single photo. It does not have an option to print two or more different pictures on a single page.

The Platinum Edition of Photosuite 4 contains two ways of working with pictures that are not available in the regular edition of Photosuite 4. Panorama and Photo Tapestry are the two additional ways of altering pictures and they are equally exciting to utilize. I tried the Panorama first because  I no longer have a panoramic camera. The User’s Manual describes how best to take pictures in order to create a panoramic photo even to creating a 360 degree panorama. I had taken some pictures in the vineyards of California that were suitable for a panorama but was dismayed when they did not appear to line up at all. You can manually align or let the software auto align. Since clearly I could not line up the pictures, I chose to auto align. I have to admit to being completely amazed when the pictures were lined up perfectly.  Photosuite is so user friendly that everything is just a click away but you do need to read.  After they were lined up, I cropped top and bottom so that the edges were even and then I had a perfect panorama. I printed my picture out and only would make one change. In the printing, the software made the picture 10.49 inches long. I would reduce the length to 10 inches.

Following the panorama I was ready to try Photo Tapestry. Photo Tapestry recreates any photo using small thumbnail photos from a database stored on the Photosuite CD. I had a picture of a yellow rose with green leaves and decided to try the Photo Tapestry on this photo. I scanned the tile collection (thumbnails) prior to doing the tapestry and did not think that there could possibly be enough shades of yellow in the thumbnail photos to duplicate the yellow rose. I was wrong. While my tapestry may well not appear to be a flower to someone else, it is a unique picture and the colors are duplicated surprisingly well. I will make some changes the next time that I do a tapestry, though. In doing a tapestry the options are to use a number of thumbnails ranging from 500 to 2000. The more that you use, the better the recreation will appear. I only used 500, so I plan to use more next time.

The next area that I chose to explore was the Compose section. Within this section you can create collages, photo layouts, cards and tags, calendars, collections, fun stuff, business and frames and edges. Each of these sections is further divided. I checked on the photo layouts and it was further divided into comic books, family trees, group photos, scrapbooks, package prints, albums, and posters. I got all excited about “family trees” but it was not quite what I expected as it turned out simply to be a way of displaying photos of the family – usually the nuclear family. My favorite thing to create is business cards and so that was the next area that I explored. I was able to create a business card using my yellow rose that I really liked but alas, none of the available templates matched the business card stock that I have on hand so I did not print.

The facets of Photosuite 4 Platinum that I like are really good, but there are some things that I do not like at all. I really like the user friendliness, the ease of the panorama and the ease of the photo tapestry. I really like the fact that all of these are in one package. The panorama feature makes today’s digital cameras more versatile. I am not pleased with the enhancement feature – it did not work to lighten or enhance all of my pictures and I had no opportunity to try further enhancement myself. When I wanted to create a project, I was very disappointed in the choices of templates – they seem to me to be limited. I also like to be able to print 2 different pictures on a single sheet of photo paper, which this software does not support. All in all though I do like Photosuite 4 Platinum and I will enjoy further exploration. I cannot stress enough the user friendliness.

Other photo software manufacturers have panoramic software and tapestry software, but the cost would be $100 or more because you must purchase 3 products. Photosuite 4-Platinum includes all three products and is available on the Internet at MGI Software for $49.95. It is also available at software retailers around town for the same price. The package comes with an Upgrade Rebate of $10. If you have any MGI Photosuite II, SE, or III, you are eligible to mail in the rebate form that is enclosed in the package. The first week in May Office Depot advertised MGI Photosuite 4 Platinum Edition with a $30 rebate in addition to the upgrade rebate, which brought the price down to $9.99. Watch for a repeat of this rebate. Also, MGI has Photosuite software for your personal digital assistant (PDAs).