Photos
You need to keep photos organised, and more importantly find them when you want without having to remember where you put them. You need to clean up photos. Finally if you're like me you might want to create images for DVD or photo book backgrounds for etc.
- Picasa for organising photos. Picasa is fast, understands RAW format files from DSLRs and has basic touching up tools built-in. The excellent picasa web makes it easy to geo-tag photos (i.e., show on google maps where you took the photos), identify faces (i.e., name people like in iPhoto 9) and publish photos to Google's secure webalbum. All this is completely free. Just like iPhoto Picasa and Picasaweb both have face tagging. You can also use photos from Picasaweb in your blogspot blogs and photos added to your blog (such as the screenshots below) automatically get added to Picasa. Synchronisation like this is where iLife lags behind.
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Adobe Photoshop Elements is the best value to money image clean-up, photo editor and digital collage creator out there. There is plenty to learn. An excellent resource on how to use it is the Photoshop Elements User Forum's learning centre. While Elements lacks the all-important masking, there are workarounds like the free plug-in, using an adjustment layer with no adjustments or using the image as a pattern. I found Corel/Jasc PaintShop Pro to be slow and its selection tools are less friendly than Adobe's. The Gimp is free, powerful but doesn't come with a lot of those easy-to-use selection tools that you will need to tidy up your photos.
Videos
Video Editing is time-consuming because we lose track of time when we film and end up with hours of meaningless shots. I select and cut my videos into 5-10 second clips and then assemble them into a 5-10 minute video. Believe me, you can spend days to produce a 5 minute video if you don't automate this process.
I use Adobe's Premier Elements having recently switched over from Sony Vegas MovieStudio Platinum. Both are great, but Adobe requires less effort and offers less control. Vegas is powerful but more time consuming to use. My advice is not to worry too much about tidying up video as you would with photos, because with videos it is the experience, not the quality of any image that matters. Instead get yourself a decent camera that can handle low light, has optical image stabilisation and good colour saturation to start with. I highly recommend using a SD-card based camera, not a DV tape, DVD or even hard disk. The last thing you need is hours of footage that has to be captured and reviewed in real-time.
- MuVee Auto Producer - Take the clips and photos, choose a background track, choose a theme...and a video is ready! Yeah right! Actually, it works. Somehow the cuts, the pans and the fades all bump along to the music track.
Now you're ready to make the DVD or Photo Album to be printed.
- FotoFusion from Lumapix just keeps getting better and better. The idea is simple: you grab a bunch of photos and drop them on to a page and arrange the photos in any way you want, add borders (or mattes) around each one and add some text. The GUI is a little quirky, but FotoFusion lets you size and align photos easily and perfectly. Best of all the output from this software is stunning. With V6 you have access to backgrounds and mattes online, which you can try and purchase within the software. Each costs from $0.50 to $2.00. I went for the Enhanced Edition to get large prints.
- Adobe Premier Elementshas all you need to put together high quality DVDs.Sony DVD Architect Studio comes bundled with Sony Vegas Movie Studio. Its great for putting together simple DVDs, or something with more complex navigation elements. I have used DVD Lab from Mediachance to produce more complex DVD menu structures.
Now you're ready to commit you masterpiece to DVD or send it off to be printed.
- TMPGenc produces an MPEG-2 encoder which seems to work better than most. The encoder really does make a difference for jitter-free playback and crisp colours without bleeding (especially red shot in poor light). The Adobe and Sony products have caught up now, so I don't use this encoder anymore. But there is a free version available.
- Nero is a general purpose DVD/CD burner. Again, the Adobe and Sony video software can burn video DVDs as well.
- Blurb is an online photo book printing service that was recommended by the Digitalscrapbooking.com magazine. They ship to Australia from the US. They also have the option of a wrap-around cover printed on your hard-copy book; most printers only do a window inset or a dust jacket.
- Snapfish is owned by HP and operate in Australia. You can pick up your orders from any Rabbit Foto outlet. I've had posters printed by them. All in all great quality and value.
How do they compare with iLife?
They are not designed to work together. So you have to learn each product individually, and this can take time.
The photo organiser (Brilliant Photos) doesn't understand the Jasc PSP file format. Neither does windows. So you can't keep your originals organised. This is true for iPhoto and Adobe Photoshop as well.
Organising and retrieving videos and video clips is much harder simply because you cannot find the one you want by looking at a snapshot. On the Mac there is iDive to add keywords, dates, etc. I haven't found anything like it on the PC.
There is something about the quality of the Mac templates for videos, DVDs and photo albums that isn't matched by their PC counterparts. FotoFusion is better for photos. MuVee's video templates cost money, but are too simple compared to iDVD.
The new iMovie 08 has a great editing mechanism. Not everyone likes it, but it is exactly suited for my style of making 5-10 clips out of my long shots.
If you can't be bothered shelling out 50-100% more for a new Apple, don't despair; the PC can be a very powerful media computer.
