You all have a digital camera and you probably can get your photographs into the computer, organize them, and edit them, but this is just the beginning.

Listed below and available to download on our PC Training Spain website  are simple pieces of software (Three of which are free) that can enhance you photography experience. You will be able to create projects with your photos put them on DVDs and make lovely inexpensive gifts.

Picasa 3
Many of us were familiar with the original Picasa, Google’s free photo editor. Well Picasa has an upgraded version, Picasa 3 with some great new tools. 

1. Transferring your photographs and movie sequences from your camera without duplication
2. Organising your photographs in date or alphabetical sequence
3. Basic editing which anyone can learn
1. Brightness & Contrast
2. Colour
3. Red eye
4. Cropping
5. Focus
4. The collage page has really been improved in Picasa 3. There are many more variations of layout, borders, drop shadows etc. These collages make great gifts when printed on paper of 160 gram (we usually print on 80 gram) and the pages compiled to make an album. Albums are very popular in the arts and crafts world.
5. Web Albums
1. Upload pictures to a free web album
2. Email friends with the URL of your album so that they can look and download your pictures
6. Printing
1. On your own printer with many different to layout your pictures
2. Online printing with direct links to Spanish and English online printing services.
7. Emailing photographs with automatic reduction in resolution to allow you to email more photographs together.
8. Upload photographs to your own free Google blog site

Photo Story 3
This is an easy to use program that turns your photos into a slide show. But not just a slide show as in Power Point. Photo Story 3 also allows you to:

1. put in text
2. Your own voice over
3. Your choice of music,
4. The most impressive aspect is the motion tool that allows you to pan out and in on a photo giving a sensation of movement. This movement makes the finished project seem like a video rather than just still photos.
5. Store the project on your computer to be played back with Windows Media Player
6. Send as an email for someone to play on their computer
7. With the aid of the Sonic DVD plug in burn onto a DVD and play on any DVD player. This makes a unique gift if the photos were of a special occasion i.e. birthday, wedding, grandchildren or a trip one has taken. 

DVD Flick
Many people forget that their digital cameras take videos! Or if they do take videos, (sometimes by mistake) then they don’t really know what to do with them. They see a strange looking icon in their photos folder and when clicked on there is the movie, sound and all, which can be quite a surprise. 

But another easy piece of free software will enable you to join your video clips together and then burn them to a DVD. It’s called DVD Flick. If you have never attempted working with clips before this is where to start. It does not allow you to edit the individual clip but it does enables you to join the clips you have, give titles to them and put them onto a DVD just like a movie DVD. 

DVD Flick will do the following:

1. Join your movie clips into a single film sequence (Please remember to use Picasa 3 to transfer the individual clips from your camera into your computer)
2. Name each of your sequences
3. Change the order of the clips within a sequence
4. Create a DVD menu with the name of your film (i.e. “Holiday in Spain”) and separate thumbnails with names of each of the completed film sequences (ie “Madrid”, Málaga”, “Us on the beach” etc.) just like you find on a commercial DVD
5. Record your completed movie, with menus, tro DVD in either “Pal” or “NTSC” format.
6. You have a choice of colours and backgrounds to your menu.

When you have mastered this then you can go to more sophisticated software, such as Cyberlink Power Director which will cost you about 40 or 50 Euros which will allow you to edit each of your film clips, as well as overlay title, background music or another sound track.

MemoriesOnTV
If you want to combine all the facilities of Photo Story 3 and DVD Flick then MemoriesOnTV is a powerful yet simple to use slideshow creator.  It has the following features:

1. Combines photographs and movie clips into one slideshow
2. Basic editing of movie clips
3. Transformation
4. Overlaying
5. Adding Text (With full control of where it is located oin you photo and the angle of rotation)
6. Special effects
7. Pan & Zoom
8. Background colours
9. Music
10. Subtitles that will be available on the DVD

This software is not free, it will cost approximately 43 Euros for the Home Edition and can be downloaded from CodeJam Website.

Fotobook
Rather than printing all those special holiday photographs and then sticking them in an album why not layout the photos on pages on your computer then have each of the pagers printed and bound into a book.

Fotobook is not so much a piece of software for your computer but an album printing service. You have to download their free software so that you can arrange your pages then you upload to their website where your pages are printed and bound and finally posted back to you.
Fotobook allows you to do the following:

1. Choose the size of your album (Minimum 15 pages, 30 sides)
2. Add extra pages
3. Total control on the number and sizes of the photos on each page
4. Insert borders & backgrounds
5. Insert text anywhere on the page
6. Drop Shadow
7. Choose a photo (Or leave blank) for the hardbound front cover
8. Insert a title to be printed on the front cover
9. Upload for printing the complete album

Because the software to create the album has been downloaded onto your computer you have total control over the creation process and the time it takes.

Fotobook prices start from 24 Euros for 40 pages for their Pocket Book up to 50 Euros for 30 pages in their Large Book which is 30 cm x 30 cm. These are all good value when you consider the cost of individually printing your photos and then buying an album.

Cheaper and simpler versions of these albums are also being produced locally by digital photography processing outlets in the high street.