Nero PhotoShow Deluxe 4 Review

I love photo slide shows. For years the screensaver on my computer was a slideshow of my photographs, because I loved watching the screen flip through memories from across the room. Over the past several years I've spent hours creating slideshows for various events-my brother-in-law's wedding, our family vacation, and an end-of-the-year banquet presentation for work. With musical backgrounds and captions added, a slideshow is a perfect way to present your photos, but it can take a lot of time and energy to create-until now.

I recently had the opportunity to try out a product called Nero PhotoShow Deluxe 4. Within 30 minutes of installing the software on my computer, I had created a PhotoShow of a recent family vacation complete with music, an artistic background, and captions that I could share with my friends and family.

I was amazed at how easy this software is to use and how robust it is. PhotoShows are just a portion of what this software can do. It also allows you to organize and manage your digital photographs and videos, edit photos, and share your PhotoShows online, on DVDs or CDs. It's really a fantastic product that can bring your photos to life!

Nero PhotoShow Deluxe 4 Features:

Organization and Management

• Allows you to easily organize and manage your photos and video in one place
• Automatically scans your hard drive to locate and import
  all applicable images and video
• Has an intuitive hierarchical display of folders, photos and video
• Provides tagging capability for simplified searches by people, places,
  comments, and other keywords
• Permits you to rename, sort and organize photos by group, album, alphabetical placement, date or contents
• Includes virtual view support for more in-depth organization, and cross-referencing support for popular image and video file types

When you first install the software, it automatically searches your hard drive for folders that contain photographs and videos. It takes a little while (especially if you have a lot of photos stored on your computer like I do), but once it's finished, you'll have instant access to all of your photos through the PhotoShow program. I really liked that this step was automatic and I didn't have to import every folder myself. It also keeps the folder structure that you've created on your computer, so it doesn't interfere with your current organization structure (if you have one). Once you have the images imported into the PhotoShow software, you can organize, search, add keywords, and browse your images quickly and easily using the intuitive user-friendly software.

Photo Editing

• Easily fix and perfect photo quality with one click
• Use red-eye reduction, clone, touch-up, drawing and paint tools
• Rotate, crop, resize, copy and paste with editing tools
• Create with 15 adjustable special effects and filters
• Fine tune brightness, saturation and color for photos and video
• Add one of over 75 photo frames to enhance photos
• Export to JPEG, BMP & TIFF formats
• Zoom and rotate video clips
• Explore five unique video effects including 'Old Film'

For basic photo editing, the PhotoShow software is great. Cropping, rotating, resizing, and touching-up are some of my favorite and most-often-used tools, all of which are easy to do within this software. It would certainly serve most people's photo editing needs.

PhotoShow Creation

• Add photos and videos to your PhotoShows
• For easy creation, choose from among sixteen one-click authoring templates
• Include video clips to add new motion to your PhotoShows
• Add animated text captions, speech and thought bubbles
• Create stunning credit sequences, and choose from 14 unique styles
• Turn PhotoShows into unique screensavers
• Share PhotoShows featuring up to 400 photos for free
• Add audio - 275 songs included free, as well as 96 clip art animations to liven up your show
• Retain full control over 30 transitions and 8 motion effects

Here's where the slideshow feature comes in. With all the pre-installed templates for backgrounds, music, and styles, you can literally create a full PhotoShow within minutes. For a more customized look, you can also choose your own music, animations, transitions, and captions. It's so easy to create a new PhotoShow for every set of photographs you have, and then share them!

Publishing, Creation and Sharing

• Share on the free personalized PhotoShow Circle websiteCreate and burn PhotoShow DVDs and watch on TV
• Make high quality prints at home, or order them online
• Order unique photo gifts, PhotoShow DVDs & calendars
• Automatically import PhotoShows that friends share with you
• Enjoy complete website customization and privacy tools
• Enable downloading of photos from your website
• Sample from 12 included templates for PhotoShow Circle website
• Archive photos, videos and PhotoShows to CD Email photos as high quality attachments

I was most impressed with the instant sharing options that PhotoShow offers. As soon as your PhotoShow is finished, you can immediately upload it to your own PhotoShow Circle web site to share it with friends and family. Or, you can have it burned to a DVD so it can be played right on your television. This added set of features is a valuable way to share your photographs with family that live far away or show them at a special event such as a wedding, anniversary or birthday party in a fun-to-watch presentation.

For anyone who loves to watch photo slideshows or has to make them frequently for family, jobs or events, I highly recommend this product. In just a short amount of time, I was able to install the software, learn about how it works, and create a finished product. The printed user-guide and help prompts within the software make it so easy to jump right in and start creating.

Just to show you how neat it is, here's a short PhotoShow I made and uploaded to my PhotoShow Circle site: Our Cruise Vacation

For more information about Nero PhotoShow Deluxe 4, visit http://ww2.nero.com/nerophotoshow/enu/index.html.