Shedding Light on Digital Darkrooms
Okay, you've already spent all of that money for a computer and a printer and your connection to the Internet. Are you having fun with it yet? One of the ways to have a lot more fun is to turn all of that equipment into a digital darkroom. The best way to get started is to buy a color flatbed scanner. A decent one will probably cost about a hundred dollars. But once you have one, you can take those boxes full of old photographs and turn them into digital files. Once they're digital…the fun begins. Turn that creative side loose with software that makes it simple. One of the easiest and least expensive programs is PhotoStudio 2000 from ArcSoft ….
"It has a studio assistant which will walk you through almost any tool in the program. A lot of competitors don't really have that feature."
ArcSoft's Tracey Quartaroli. Even usually complex tasks like layering…blending several photos or text together into a single image….is easy enough for anyone. And if you make a mistake…
"The nice thing about PhotoStudio is that it's got unlimited levels of undo and redo. So you can actually start messing around with your picture and add special effects or add colors to it and if you don't like it, you can just undo it."
There's a lot of very good competition in the picture editing software category, ArcSoft holds its own among the best. You can find links from today's broadcast and all the rest at ThirdAge.com. Bootcamp, I'm Fred Fishkin for CBS News.