On my recent trip to the Middle East there were four people – one third of our group! - carrying brand new digital cameras. It wasn’t that long ago when a digital camera was a high-end geek gadget, but no more. Everyone is getting them.

And some of the new owners don’t have a clue about how to process their photos. One fellow traveler admitted that although she had learned how to snap pictures before getting on the plane she was fuzzy about how to suck them out of the camera when she got back. She was surprised when I told her that she would be able to edit the photos – crop, rotate, adjust the color – on her computer.

StudioLine Photo 2 is an excellent program for photographers with limited computer skills who want to do something beyond the norm with their digital photos. More advanced users will find that the automated features of the program can save them time. It works with photos taken with a digital camera, scanned photos or photo disks that you can now get along with your paper prints. StudioLine Photo 2 does several things well and simply.

First, it allows you to organize your photographs. Digital photos are virtually free – no film to buy and no developing costs. One person came back from the trip with more than 2,000 photos! Keeping track of them can be challenging. StudioLine Photo 2 helps you organize your photos so that you can easily find them.

The program works with copies of your photos rather than the originals. This is a very good thing. More than once I have cropped a photo, lowered the resolution or done some irreversible thing to it and then accidentally saved it, losing the original forever. This program saves you from yourself.

One photo can be stored in multiple galleries, so I could file a photo of children in Hebron, for example, in both the Hebron and the children galleries. There are numerous ways to label your photos. You can name them, independent of the file name, and give them descriptors. A descriptor can be as simple as a caption, or can contain more complex information. There is a powerful search function that allows you to search the descriptors across galleries.

All this is simply accomplished. You move photos into a gallery by dragging them there.

Second, StudioLine Photo 2 contains powerful photo editing tools. The basic tools are crop, rotate and redeye reduction. There are 11 correction tools: Auto tone levels; hue saturation and brightness; equalize brightness; sharpness; exposure correction, blur, despeckle, etc. There are 12 effects that you can apply: soft edges, bicolor, and colorize, for example.

All of the editing tools work with interactive sliders, are WISYG and easily reversed. There is infinite re-do. Best of all, you can apply a set of effects to multiple photos at once, saving time and ensuring consistency. With the text tool you can add original text to photos or grab a data field right from the descriptors. This would be an efficient way of adding a copyright notice.

Third, you can bundle your photos for distribution. There are several options: slide show, web gallery, e-mail and print.

Print can automatically position your photos on the page for the most efficient use of your expensive photo paper and toner. You can select multiple photos to print and specify a different number of copies for each photo.

Slide show makes a full-screen slide show of a gallery. Although this works well, the show requires the StudioLine program for display. I found this of limited usefulness. A nice upgrade for the program would be a slide show that you can easily share with others.

E-mail lets you e-mail a photo or a group of selected photos. You select the photos and the size and file format (JPG, Tiff, PNG, BMP, GIF, etc) and the program will automatically open your e-mail program and attach the photos. It also gives you a running count of the file size to keep you from overburdening a friend’s e-mail account, and you can make the photos smaller if it looks like you are getting carried away. You can also choose to include the photo descriptors with the message.

But why e-mail photos if you can display them on the Web?

StudioLine can make a Web Gallery. This is a Web page consisting of thumbnails, or small copies of your photos, that link to full-sized photos. There are ten general templates bundled with the program and five more available for download from the StudioLine Web site; plans to add more templates are in the works.

The process is completely automated: the program creates the thumbnails and the links to the larger photos. You don’t have to know a bit of HTML. It can add captions based on your descriptors, and some of the templates leave room for a few paragraphs of text.

The program also includes a file transfer program that helps you upload the galleries to your own Web site. They give you some temporary space on your own server, if you don’t have access of your own, so you can get started sharing your photos right away.

The last think the StudioLine Photo 2 does is help you archive your photographs. There are several options for offloading your photos onto CD-ROM or DVD.

The best things about the program are its intuitiveness and its outstanding help system.

I was able to use the program right out of the box, without cracking the manual. Context-sensitive help accompanies every action. You can elect to suppress the help windows after you become more familiar with the program.

There is a get started tour, tutorials, a decent help file and an excellent manual. On their Web site, StudioLine, there is a discussion forum where you can ask questions and get responses from an expert.

I had a few minor complaints about the program and let the company know. Believe it or not, they agreed with me and are fixing them in the next update. They appear to be very responsive to their customers. The have a Web-based “smart update” feature that allows them to make frequent changes to the program so that it is always up to date.

All in all though, this is an outstanding program for home users who want to organize, edit and share their digital photographs

Better yet, you can download a free 30-day trial from their Web site. It costs $44 + tax to register the downloaded copy, or you can have a boxed version shipped to you for $49 plus $6 for shipping to Texas. There’s a PDF version of the manual included with the downloaded copy. The boxed version should also be available in retail software stores.

Contact the company at H&M Systems Software, Inc., 600 E. Crescent Ave., Suite 203, Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458-1846, Phone: +1 (201) 934-3414

The company has another program, StudioLine Web, which includes the Photo program and bundles it with powerful Web design tools. A demo version is also available for download from their Web site.

I liked this program and will recommend it to several friends who have wanted to create Web photo galleries and didn’t know where to start. This is a simple solution that contains high-end tools at a bargain price.

Graphics:

(studiolinephoto2-1) image 1: In the background you can see an image archive, the one called qualgallery1. I selected four images and used the bottom tool bar to create a Web gallery using these photos. The template selection window on the right popped up, along with a tip explaining the specifics of the chosen gallery template.

(studiolinephoto2-2) image 2: This shows how easy it is to edit images in StudioLine Photo 2. I added soft edges; a slider can control the entire process. If I later change my mind, I can right click on the altered image, select “”Active image tools” from the drop-down list and delete any effects I no longer want to use.