I love simplicity. You know, not having to read detailed instructions, take special courses, or work twice as hard as you need to in order to achieve the same result. Having said that, it makes perfect sense to me that PhotoMix by fCoder Group, Inc. impressed me like no other program has in quite a long time. I love to work with graphic files, video files, and computer games. What I don’t care for is spending most of my time reading telephone book size instruction manuals before I can work with the graphic files. I know that there are several excellent programs out there for photo and graphic editing, such as Paint Shop Pro, CorelDraw, and of course Photoshop, but quite frankly they are not very intuitive and it takes a fair amount of time and effort to achieve really nice results. PhotoMax takes a very small part of photo editing, namely creation of photo montages, and simplifies it to a point that any novice can easily use and still achieve results almost every bit as good as Photoshop with a fraction of the effort. This program is especially useful for those people, mainly women, who are into the art of scrapbooking. In fact the program touts itself as such, and is one of the most user friendly programs I’ve had the pleasure of using.

System requirements for PhotoMix are as follows: Windows 95 and above, PIII or better processor, minimum of 128MB RAM, 16 bit or better color display adapter (accelerator not needed), 30 MB of hard drive real estate, and a mouse. Not a huge resource hog as you can see. The disc installed easily on my machine and registration was easily accomplished online. The program boots up with a built in tutorial so that you can get your feet wet immediately.

Basically all you have to do is select as many graphic files as you want (JPEG’s seem to be the favorite, but works with others as well), select one of the included templates, and then drag and drop the photos from your thumbnail viewer to the actual montage “canvas”. The rest is nothing more that manipulating the photos on the active window with zoom, scroll, text, and drag the photo to another part of the workspace. All the controls are easily used by clicking on the active photo and using the icons that pop up. You can also add special effects such as motion blur, rippling, soft focus, borders, backgrounds, sepia toning, and etc.

As I referred to before, if you get a little confused, you can click on the help menu at any time and the tutorial will instantly pop back up on your workspace to lead you through the task. The results are excellent and easily printed out on any laser or inkjet printer. There are even a few included photo files for you to experiment on until you feel very comfortable with the controls, which truly shouldn’t take too long. Support is excellent although there is no manual, the web site is excellent and includes even more tutorials along with freebie downloads such as extra borders, fonts, special effects, clip art, backgrounds, and themes such as Halloween and Back to School. Upgrades to the latest version are also free.

The program may be purchased online for $29.99 payable by credit card through a secure transaction. I don’t think the program can be purchased at any retail store such as Comp USA or Best Buy as I did a thorough search and did not find it listed. It is an excellent program to get started with, and as I said before especially useful for scrapbooking. I cannot recommend this program highly enough and feel very fortunate to have had the pleasure of testing and reviewing it. Two very enthusiastic thumbs up for all. Until next time, take care and keep on clicking.