contd.

 

As you can see from my example it’s child’s play to make alterations to the titles or captions once the page is made. This can be done either from the Properties Editor, or straight on the thumbnail page itself. Cool!


Photo Gallery: setting photo layout,
borders and text format

Getting the photos to the page was one of the easiest tasks ever despite the impressive level of choice and customisation. Getting the best end result, however, involved a little trial and error. My first attempts produced some very blurred artwork, and my second some very blurred photographs.

The problem proved mainly to be operator error - mine. First rule of software. Read the manual! The Photo Gallery is meant to be a quick tool to give the best possible photo album results for the small business user or amateur photographer. If you use it like that it will produce great albums. The most important requirement is to use full sized, uncompressed photos to start off with - Fusion will turn them into lightweight web graphics for you, with very good looking thumbnails. If, like me, you feed it squished jpegs, it will just squish them again, and the result won’t be pretty.




Picture Thumbnails!

your thumbnails have never looked so manicured!

I know these frames will take up bandwidth, but aren’t they pretty? In case you’re wondering, the slide effect can also be reproduced using a 60 page Photoshop tutorial. I’m kidding - but only just. Fusion 7 does a very good job of faking it, n’est-ce pas?

Almost perfect?
The Photo Gallery is a doddle. The designers should be commended for the gorgeous interface. As in the rest of Fusion, everything you need is all in the same place.

It works best using large photos preferably of a uniform size and dimension. It’s worth fixing any lighting, color or focusing problems in your images beforehand, but don’t bother to compress them. Feed them full-sized into the program, and Fusion will make smaller versions of them into quick loading web pictures.

From the purely personal point of view (that of a graphic designer), I would love to see better compression quality and more control of image sizing. Until these refinements take place, artists who need this tool will be champing at the bit. In its present incarnation the Gallery tool cannot do justice to many pictures - and is quite poor at making gif files.

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