Product: Custom Photo
Company: Corel
Website: http://www.corel.com
Estimated Street Price: $29.99
Review By: Julien JAY

Internet Features

One of the strong points of Corel Custom Photo is that it’s Internet ready software. However this word takes a real new meaning in Corel Custom Photo as home users can take digital photos easily, edit them and publish them to HTML without knowing the working of HTML code! Then a simple wizard will publish the HTML page on the web without having to pay a Webmaster to host the photos and without the need to use those complex FTP transferring tools. We said that Corel Photo House 5 is internet oriented and one supplementary evidence is the Optimize for the web feature that let users convert every image to a Web compatible format such as JPEG, GIF, for fast downloading. Another good point of this feature is the interactive slider and the live preview that help users find the best possible balance between file size and image quality.

Corel Project Designer

The second software of the Custom Photo suite is Corel Project Designer a cool tool to create projects in order to publish them on various medias (web, papers, tee-shirts, etc.). This software wears the same interface than Corel Photo House so users won’t be disrupted. When you first start it you have to choose one of the numerous predefined projects the wizard is offering to you. From diploma & CD booklets to Tee-shirts everything is included to let you express your artistic fibre. When you open a new project a blank page is displayed and will remind anyone the Corel Draw! Interface feeling. On this white page you have to validate and follow the steps by steps instructions provided by the wizard located on the left of the screen to create your project. The left guide panel also gives you quick access to the clipart library. Once the wanted layout appears on the page you can add texts, draw lines using the famous plume tool (you can even customize the line style [dot lines, arrows, etc.] change color, etc.), and more. Each vector objects can be resized, move, rotate just like in Corel Draw! using the anchor points of a selected object. Sure you can add easily test labels to every project and customize them in a very accurate way: you can choose the color style of the text (shading effects, etc.), as well as the font and the size of it. Plus you can change and define line spacing, number of text columns, alignment of the text in rapport with the size of your project, and much more! You can even draw table and customize them. But the thing you'll like the most is surely the fact that Corel Project Designer comes with a build-in spell checker and a synonymous dictionary! Like in Microsoft Office applications words you type and that are unrecognized are underlined in red and the software suggests the correct spelling (if available). The activity wizard also guides you to create shades, nuances to lighten or darken objects, colouring, etc. The drag & drop support allows you to drag templates, photos, and clipart into any project. Like in Corel Photo House 5 the main toolbar of the Project Designer contains paste/copy/cut buttons as well as a multiple undo/redo feature. You can define URL links in projects to make interactive pictures. The new search engine lets you search the clipart libraries to find a specific theme related picture. From Corel Project Designer you can even send your project to email using the email feature. One hard thing with this kind of software has always been to print the document you’ve got on the screen in order to output it correctly on your printer. This is always a touchy operation but hopefully Corel Project Designer guides users to print the best way their project through an other smart wizard. Corel Custom Photo includes a multimedia introduction to help users getting started with the software and its simple basis. The Project Designer also allows you to switch from colour mode to gray mode or Black & White mode in order to have a real preview before you'll print the project depending on your printer capabilities. Finally the Corel Project Designer also includes a small build in web browser just like Corel Photo House 5.0 to surf the web directly from the software to access Corel Custom Photo resource centre for example or to many other websites, forums and more.