These days, it's easier than ever to get your pictures onto your computer. This can lead to lots of fun projects incorporating your photos and your own personal touch. These products are ideal for anyone who enjoys working with family photos in fun and creative ways, with options for most any budget. See something you'd like for yourself? Use the "Email this page" link to send a hint to Santa! (Updated: Dec. 2008)
1. Adobe Photoshop Elements (Windows and Macintosh)
Photoshop Elements is designed for amateur photographers, digital imaging enthusiasts, and small business users. It incorporates many of Photoshop's powerful features and interface elements without being too overwhelming to the novice user. Automated features simplify many tasks such as posting online Web photo galleries and stitching multiple photos to create panoramas. Easy-to-use designer layouts let you create photo book pages, photo album pages, greeting cards, CD and DVD sleeves and labels, slide shows, Video-CDs, Web galleries, "flipbook" animations, calendars, and more. The integrated photo organizer makes it an excellent all-in-one photo solution.
2. Wacom Bamboo Fun Graphics Tablet (Windows and Macintosh)
Wacom's newest line of graphics tablets is perfect for photo-funatics. You can use a graphics tablet to edit photos, paint and draw with pressure sensitivity, write in your own handwriting, or simply as a more comfortable pointing device than a mouse. The medium-sized Bamboo Fun has a 8.5" by 5.3" wide-aspect active area, and comes with a cordless pen and mouse. Included with the Bamboo Fun tablet is an excellent bundle of software, including Photoshop Elements and Painter Essentials.
3. Corel Painter Essentials (Windows and Macintosh)
Corel Painter Essentials is designed to help beginners or non-artists create digital art and turn photos into art work. Users can turn photos into paintings automatically, or by working with the cloning tools manually. Painter Essentials also includes many natural media brushes such as acrylics, airbrushes, art pens, oils, blenders, chalk, crayons, watercolors, palette knives, pastels, pencils, etc.
4. Alien Skin Splat! (Windows and Macintosh)
Splat! is a collection of fun and versatile effects for creating frames, textures, edge effects, borders, mosaics, and patterns. The six "content-powered" filters are: Border Stamp, Edges, Fill Stamp, Frame, Patchwork, and Resurface. Splat! includes hundreds of content files, plus you can create and add your own for endless variety. Splat! is compatible with most photo editing software that accepts plug-ins and makes a great addition to Photoshop Elements.
5. Alien Skin Snap Art (Windows and Macintosh)
Alien Skin Snap Art is a collection of ten filters that can give your photos the artistic styling of colored pencil, Impasto, Pointillism, pen and ink, pencil sketch, pastels, comics, watercolor, oil painting, and Pop Art. Snap Art comes with hundreds of settings presets as well as manual controls, so users can transform photos into art work quickly and with the precise level of detail that they desire.
6. Corel Ulead PhotoImpact
PhotoImpact delivers a mind-boggling array of features at a price that makes it one of the best values in image editing software for Windows. PhotoImpact offers a suite of tools for Web graphics creation, image editing, photo correction and enhancement, drawing and painting, plus plenty of extras for special effects and creative exploration. PhotoImpact is easy and fun to use, but flexible enough to grow with the user.
7. Photodex ProShow Gold (Windows)
ProShow is a feature-rich program for creating slide shows from your pictures, video clips, and music. The slide shows you create can be played back on a PC or burned to discs that can be viewed in most DVD players. You can also export the slide shows as MPEG video, screen savers, and more. It's easy enough to complete a slide show in less than ten minutes, but with all the options available, you may find yourself spending much longer to add effects, synchronize audio, and personalize your shows with captions.
8. Logitech NuLOOQ Navigator Design Controller (Macintosh and Windows)
© Logitech
The Logitech NuLOOQ navigator is a unique productivity-enhancing control device for anyone who works with creative software on a regular basis. It occupies very little desk space, and sets alongside your keyboard and mouse, trackpad, or graphics tablet as you control it with your other hand. The NuLOOQ is pre-configured to work with Adobe Creative Suite 2, Photoshop Elements, Microsoft Word and Excel, Firefox, Macromedia Flash, and more. I found the device quite flexible and comfortable to use, and it definitely increased my productivity, especially for photo editing and design tasks.
9. Greeting Card Designer
This software helps you create professional-looking greeting card designs without the hassle of starting from scratch. From the Publisher: "Greeting Card Designer is a collection of Actions, Tool Presets, Artistic Borders, Templates, Help Files and Images that help you create professional looking greeting cards using Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. You can use your own images or use on of the included images to create your card."10. Dell Color Laser Printer 1230c (Windows and Macintosh)
Although ink jet printers are better at printing color photos at home, photo fun-atics tend to print a lot of photos, and that can get expensive. Color laser printers are becoming much more affordable these days, and in the long run it can be more affordable than ink jet printing. Although color laser toner cartridges and much more expensive than ink cartridges, they tend to last a very long time. The Dell 1230c is a very inexpensive color laser option.
