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You buy a printer and it comes with some excellent software that does everything you ever think you will need to allow manipulation and more to any image that you have. The same is true for most cameras and even some scanners.

Now you decide that you need a new printer and it comes with different software so you need to learn again how to make those adjustments to your images. I will admit that changing a camera is something you probably do less often than with a printer but the same applies, often even with the same make of unit the software is different.

Photo Explosion Deluxe is from Nova Development and they are not nearly so well known as JASC or PhotoShop and consequently their full product sells for £39.95 somewhat less than Paint Shop Pro and a great deal less than PhotoShop. I am not claiming that Photo Explosion could or should be used in a professional environment as it does not all that PhotoShop does. However it can probably do almost everything the amateur requires. If you outgrow it then by all means move on.

See also: Graphic software

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This is V2 of the product and joy or joys it comes with a printed manual. It would be an exaggeration to say I read it while the installation was going on, but, the basic programs full install takes 30 minutes (on a fast PC) and uses only three of the four provided CD’s. I then installed an extra program 62MB that works with Palm offerings there are also similar programs for Pocket PC and even for mobile phones. So the total hard disc space required is 2490MB.

Before you thing that 2490MB is a lot – it is – this is not just a photo manipulation package it is also close to a DTP package and certainly does a lot of things that can be done in those packages today. As an example the main menu offers under Projects, Business Cards, Certificates, Clothing, Crafts, Greeting Cards, Labels, Matching Sets, Photo Frames, Postcards, Scrapbooks, Signs and Photos, Stationery and blanks for most of the items mentions. All of those subjects have sub menus. Where you may say is the DTP well in a recent DTP product I reviewed it did some of the things mentioned above.

This is a Digital Photo Studio that can do all the things above and create special effects for your photographs as well as the routine things that you want to do like red eye removal, cropping and changing contrast etc. This of course has a learning curve but nothing like that of certain high end products. To give an example I selected a business card I liked the look of opened it by double clicking on the thumbnail and -without recourse to the manual – selected the first piece of text clicked on edit and text and changed it, this I did for the other items of text and then changed the photo, in all this must have taken close to five minutes. I found almost everything I tried was as simple to do.

Now the big question do you stick to what you have got, buy the full version of what you have the crippled version of or buy Photo Explosion Deluxe, your choice.

www.novadevelopment.co.uk/products/uk/pkw/default.aspx