Looking for an easy way to manipulate your digital images? Adobe Photodeluxe Home Edition 4 could be the answer. If you have a scanner or digital camera, you're probably struggling to keep track of a rapidly expanding library of images. The chances are that you'll have some gripes about a few of them. Fixing them, however, can mean spending hours fiddling with heavyweight software. We've managed to get our hands on the latest version of Adobe's popular Photodeluxe Home Edition. Designed with novices in mind, it can bring a touch of class or crass to any photograph you throw at it. Adobe has trimmed down the menus, with tasks displayed as a series of icons at the top of the screen. Clicking any of them launches a mini project, similar to a wizard, that guides you through all the steps you need to complete your chosen task. The results were remarkable. Trying to achieve the same thing with professional packages such as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro would involve a lot more work, but Photodeluxe speeds through the jobs in seconds. The most common adjustments - brightness, colour and contrast - are all tweaked by moving arrows along a sliding scale. But if you don't have the time nor the inclination to do this yourself, Photodeluxe will do it for you, and the automated results are impressive. That said, we were disappointed to find that although you can resize your images, Photodeluxe does nothing to change the page size unless you delve into the Advanced Menus. So, if you're thinking of enlarging your pictures and you're not yet familiar with all the options, you'll lose parts of the image. Images can be rotated by 90 degrees in either direction, but if you want to tilt a couple of degrees either way, you'll have to hit the Advanced Menus and do it yourself. There are one-click actions for zapping red-eye, and the software can remove dust and scratches from scanned images. But this can cause a loss of definition. A selection of fun effects lets you warp your images by pinching the centre and draping them over an imaginary sphere. Our favourite was the 'chrome' effect, turning people in our holiday snaps into the shape-shifting baddie from the film Terminator 2. What you can't do with Photodeluxe is create images from scratch: it's not a design package and the drawing tools are limited to specific needs, such as when you need to paint over your original images or add text. This doesn't mean that you can't be creative, and there are several projects to give you some inventive ideas. Adobe has also included ActiveShare, which installs itself on your Windows toolbar. This offers fewer functions than Photodeluxe, limiting itself to trimming, rotating and adjusting the colours of an image, but lets you scan, print or upload your work to the Internet. This is a useful tool for quick organisation of your images.
