By Dale Farris, Vice President
Golden Triangle PC Club
June 2004

General Overview

FotoFinish is the latest new product from SmartDraw.com, the folks responsible for the marvelous SmartDraw lineup of super drawing programs.

Note:  FotoFinish is the program that upgrades SmartDrawPhoto, the super SmartDraw program designed to help you organize, enhance, print, and share photos. All the powerful, smart features found in SmartDrawPhoto are now integrated into the even better FotoFinish program.

If you own a digital camera, or a scanner, you need FotoFinish! Why? Because FotoFinish is any easy and quick way to organize, enhance, print, and share photos. FotoFinish is also a powerful graphic editor for creating beautiful images and web graphics, and is actually like two programs in one.

FotoFinish provides a complete solution for organizing, editing, and publishing all types of digital images, including photographs, web graphics, and scanned documents. Whether you need to touch up a photo, create an album, or share an image online, FotoFinish makes it easy with step-by-step wizards to guide you. The program also includes hundreds of stock images, as well as numerous intuitive tools for painting, drawing, and applying special effects. The program will also assist in creating dazzling web graphics.

With SmartDraw's SmartDraw Professional Plus 6 and FotoFinish programs combined, you have a family of products designed to help you easily draw anything and produce graphics for business and home use. The very smart SmartDraw folks also support SmartDrawNet that allows you to seamlessly publish images and invite friends to view these online in your own secure, personal web space.

FotoFinish Features

Ease of Use
Photo Wizard - Edit your photos with the easy-to-use Photo Wizard. Let the wizard guide you through the otherwise complicated touch up and printing process in just ten easy steps:

1) Rotate
2) Crop Standard Print Sizes, Shapes and Borders (STUDIO and SUITE Only)
3) Exposure
4) Color
5) Layers (STUDIO and SUITE Only)
6) Touch Up
7) Red-eye
8) Effects
9) Borders (STUDIO and SUITE Only)
10) Print

Previews - Adjust your photos with the help of previews - Previews help you fix color balance, exposure, and more

Drag-and-Drop Interface - Intuitive interface makes organizing and working with digital images a breeze: dock image albums for easy access, drag and drop images, access tools in just a few, quick clicks, and much more

Drag and drop images from Albums and the Image Explorer tree

Extensive Help -Navigate the software with the help of Tool Tips and Hints -Get a free, easy-to-read electronic user's guide free online -Visit our free digital photography resources for a glossary, quick lessons, in-depth tutorials, and more

Print and Share Your Photos
Easy-to-Use Wizards - Let FotoFinish's easy-to-use wizards guide you through printing, e-mailing, and publishing your photos to the web

Standard Print Sizes - Crop any image to standard print sizes or use the print wizard to print images using standard photo layouts: 2" x 3," 3" x 5," 4" x 6," 5" x 7," and 8" x 10"

Simple Print Layouts - Print multiple images on one page or create a sheet of thumbnails with the help of predefined print layouts

Fun Print Layouts - Merge images with fun printing templates for special occasions, holidays, greetings, and more. (SUITE Only)

Predefined layouts help you print and publish your images

Print Albums and Images - Print a single image, a group of selected images, a whole album, or all open images

Descriptions and Footers - Print image descriptions and footers with your images

Optimize - Optimize images by changing color depth and image size

Slide Show - View any album as a slide show

Screensaver - Set any album as your screensaver

Create your own screensaver

Free Web Sharing - Publish images to your free FotoFinish Net account in just a few, easy clicks then invite friends and family to view your albums

Edit Digital Photographs
Photo Wizard - Touch up your photos using FotoFinish's intuitive Photo Wizard as your guide. (Complete Photo Wizard available in STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Resize - Resize a selection or your entire image

Rotate - Rotate your photos using intuitive knob controls or precise degree commands

Lossless Rotation - Rotate your images as thumbnails in album windows without having to re-save lossy image file formats like JPGs

Crop Photos - Crop your photos to standard print sizes or freeform rectangles

Crop an image

Special Crop Shapes - Crop photos to special shapes (hearts, stars, and more) (STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Wide Range of Selection Tools - Select any portion of an image using five different selection tools: oval, rectangle, polygon, lasso, and magic wand (STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Intuitive Resizing of Selections - Use adjustment and rotation handles to resize and adjust your selections

Adjust Exposure - Adjust exposure, saturation, hue, brightness, contrast, and color balance with the help of previews

Remove red-eye - Remove red-eye with a single click

Retouch Photos - Fix scratches and dust with the Touch Up Tool

Sepia and B&W - Convert photos to sepia or black and white

Floating Borders - Add a border around any image (STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Special Effects - Choose from eleven different special effects including: blur, sharpen, colorize, emboss, mosaic, posterize, sepia, solarize, speckle, texturize (with 15 different textures), and vignette

Layers - Use layers to experiment while preserving the integrity of your original image. Quickly go back and adjust your photo in different states without having to modify or recreate the entire project (STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Create digital watermarks, experiment with special effects, and combine multiple images into artistic collages, desktop wallpapers, and more

Layer Controls - Rearrange, move, and merge layers as your project requires. Adjust the opacity of your layer to create subtle, artistic effects (STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Painting and Drawing Tools - Choose between the pencil, paintbrush, and spray can tools to paint and draw freehand (STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Paint and draw freehand lines and shapes

Shape Tools - Draw shapes easily with predefined shape tools including a rectangle, oval, and polygon tool (STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Draw with the help of predefined shapes

Line Tool - Draw straight lines more easily with the Line Tool (STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Tool Settings Panel - Use the Tool Settings Panel to set fill, border, and background color, and to manipulate selections: rotate, flip, and apply transparency and other special effects (STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Opacity - Adjust the opacity of selections and painting tools (STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Brush and Fill Color Settings - Paint with the standard palette of solid colors, customize your own colors from the 16.7 million colors available, create a gradient, or choose a texture (STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Customizable Color Settings - Customize your color menu to your favorite palette (STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Recently Used Settings - Turn to the recently used color menu for quick access (STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Drop Shadows and Smoothing - Apply shadows and edge blending (smoothing) to any selection (STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Eraser Tool - Use the eraser tool to paint with a selected background color or erase pixels when working with layers (STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Floating Text - Add smooth (anti-aliased) text you can edit again and again (STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Connect Floating Objects - Easily connect two floating objects with a line (STUDIO & SUITE Only)

Create and Design Digital Photo Projects

Customizable Photo Layouts - Get hundreds of professionally-designed photo layouts you can customize. Create: -Greeting Cards -Album Pages and Collages -Scrapbook Pages -Photo Frames -Photo Calendars -Business Flyers and Brochures and much more! (SUITE Only)

Drag-and-Drop Clip Art - Decorate any photo layout with hundreds of graphics including borders and special occasion clip art (SUITE Only)

Insert Photos into Layouts - Insert photos inside specialized photo frames by double-clicking on the specially marked placeholders in your layouts (SUITE Only)

Edit Photos from inside FotoFinish Designer. Double-click any photo or bitmap in Designer to launch FotoFinish Designer (SUITE Only)

Design Your Own Layout - Start from scratch and design your own photo layout. Create dazzling album and scrapbook pages, collages, greeting cards, invitations, announcements, business flyers, brochures, and more (SUITE Only)

Create Printing Templates for FotoFinish. Save any layout as a printing template to be used in FotoFinish (SUITE Only)

Stock Photos and Graphics - Choose images from over 3,000 stock photos and graphics (SUITE Only)

Choose from over 3,000 stock photos and graphics when you own SUITE

Stock Clip Art - Choose from professionally-designed buttons, bars, clip art, textures, backgrounds, and more

Supported File Formats

BMP - Uncompressed bitmap
GIF - Optimized palette with optional transparency
JPEG - Three levels of compression: compact, normal, and fine
PSD - Open and save Photoshop documents. All visible layers will be merged into one
TIFF - Choose between four compression types: LZW, JPEG, Packbits, and None. Select one of two color profiles: RGB or CMYK

Transfer and Organize Photos
Transfer Photos - Transfer pictures from digital cameras or scanners with TWAIN drivers and from devices that register as removable drives such as CD-ROMs, memory sticks, and flash card readers

Scan for Photos - Search your computer for images based on file type, directory, and keywords

Albums - Folders that contain images are automatically handled as Albums. Albums open in a separate window that floats above the work area and show thumbnails, image names, and image descriptions. (Note: For easy identification, albums are marked with a blue FotoFinish icon)

Albums provide an easy way to view and annotate your images

Annotate Images - Add descriptions and comments to any image. You can even print and publish these annotations later

Organize Albums - Rearrange images within an album by dragging-and-dropping them into place. You can also copy or move images between albums using drag-and-drop

Copy and move images using drag-and-drop

Image Explorer - Use the Image Explorer to browse for images on your computer using the familiar Windows tree format

Album Previews - Mouse over a folder to see a thumbnail preview of the entire album

Previews help you browse through your entire image collection

Image Previews - Mouse over an image to see a thumbnail preview of the image with information about its size and type

My Albums - Add any folder to My Albums for quick and easy access

Create Albums - Create new albums to help manage your images

Rename Images and Albums - Rename images and albums just as you would using Windows Explorer

A Photo Wizard offers instant access to FotoFinish's powerful photo editing tools and guides you through the otherwise complicated retouching and publishing process in eight easy steps: 1) Rotate 2) Crop 3) Exposure
4) Color 5) Touch Up 6) Red-eye 7) Effects 8) Publish

All adjustment dialogs provide a helpful preview of selected effects.

Choose your effects with the help of previews.

ToolTips automatically label buttons on the toolbar.

Extensive help is available for every command. The easy-to-read electronic user's guide is available free on-line or on your program CD-ROM. The familiar drag-and-drop interface makes opening and organizing thousands of images a simple task.

Drag and drop images from albums and the Image Explorer tree.

Free online resources with a glossary, quick lessons, and in-depth tutorials.

Capture and organize photos.

Transfer pictures from digital cameras or scanners with TWAIN drivers.

Transfer pictures from devices that register as removable drives, such as CD ROMs, memory stick and flash card readers, as well as some digital cameras.

Scan the hard drive for images based on file type, directory, and keywords.

Folders that contain images are automatically handled as albums.

Albums open in a separate window that floats above the work area and show thumbnails, image names, and image descriptions.

Albums provide an easy way to view and annotate your images.

Add descriptions and comments to any image. You can even print and publish these annotations later.

Rearrange images within an album by dragging and dropping them into place.

Use the Image Explorer to browse for images on your computer using the familiar Windows tree format. For easy identification, albums are marked with an orange FotoFinish icon. Move the mouse over a folder to see a thumbnail preview of the entire album.

Previews help you browse through your entire image collection.

Move the mouse over an image to see a thumbnail preview of the image with information about its size and type. Search the Image Explorer for any image using keywords.

Add any folder to My Albums for quick and easy access. Create new albums to help manage your images. Copy or move images between albums using drag-and-drop.

Copy and move images using drag-and-drop. Rename images and albums just as you would using Windows Explorer.

Edit and retouch photos. Let the Photo Wizard walk you through the steps of touching up and publishing a photo, including rotate, resize, resample, and crop images.

Select any portion of an image using five different selection tools, including oval, rectangle, polygon, lasso, and magic wand. Use adjustment and rotation handles to resize and adjust selections. Adjust exposure, saturation, hue, brightness, contrast, and color balance. All adjustment dialogs provide helpful visual previews.

Remove red-eye with a single click.

Fix scratches and dust with the Touch Up tool.

Add a border around any image.

Choose from ten different special effects, including blur, sharpen, colorize, emboss, mosaic, posterize, sepia, solarize, speckle, and texturize (with 27 different textures).

Set an image as your wallpaper with a single click. Convert full-color images to artistic black and white.

Create and edit Web graphics.

Choose between the pencil, paintbrush, and spray can tools to paint and draw freehand. Draw shapes easily with predefined shape tools, including a rectangle, oval, and polygon tool.

Draw straight lines more easily with the Line tool.

Use adjustment and rotation handles to resize and adjust the shape or selected drawing. Re-select the most recently drawn object in your image.

Use the Tool Settings Panel to set fill, border, and background color, and manipulate selections using rotate, flip, apply transparency, and other special effects.

Paint with the standard palette of solid colors. Customize your own colors from the 16.7 million available colors, create a gradient, or choose a texture to paint with.

Adjust the transparency of selections and painting tools. Apply shadows and edge blending (smoothing). Apply a fill color, gradient, or texture to any selection. Use the eraser tool to paint with a selected background color.

Add text to your photos and images.

Invert colors. Choose images from over 1000 stock photos. Create a web project with over 500 web graphics, including buttons, bars, textures, and backgrounds.

Supported file formats include BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, PSD, TIFF.

Open and save Photoshop documents, and all visible layers will be merged into one.

Publish photos and graphics. Let easy-to-use wizards guide you in printing, e-mailing, and publishing your photos on the web. Optimize images by changing color depth and image size.

Modify resolution without affecting image size.

Print, publish, or e-mail one image or a whole album. Print, publish, and
e-mail file names, image descriptions, and footers. Merge images with predefined templates to be printed, published on the web, or e-mailed to friends and family.

Predefined layouts help print and publish your images. Simple layouts allow you to arrange multiple images on a page. Standard photo size layouts allow you to print images at standard photo sizes, including 2x3, 4x6, 5x7, and 8x10. Fun layouts provide professionally designed templates for common holidays and celebrations.

Publish images to your free SmartDrawNet account in just a few clicks, and share images on your free SmartDrawNet account.

Insert photos into SmartDraw diagrams, forms, flyers, and invitations. Add photos to SmartDraw diagrams and presentations. Copy and paste clip art and symbols from SmartDraw libraries into your FotoFinish projects. To edit any photo or bitmap in SmartDraw, double-click it to launch FotoFinish.

Create your own custom templates in SmartDraw for printing original calendars, album pages, and announcements with your favorite photos.

Copy and paste images from FotoFinish into any Microsoft Office application, or simply drag images from the Image Explorer.

Operational Features

The first time you run FotoFinish, the program will present you with a Scan for Photos dialog to alert you that it will scan you hard drive to locate images on your system. By default, the program will scan your program files, network drives, but any removable media will not be scanned. The scan will produce an organized catalog of all the images it finds and store the catalog in the My Albums area at the top of the Image Explorer tree. You can later re-scan a specific folder or the entire system again.

The Program Window includes the Image Explorer, the Work Area, and the Tool Settings Panel. The Image Explorer displays the file system on the computer in a familiar tree format. To open an album, double-click its name or drag it to the Work Area. The open album can float, or you can dock it by dragging it to any of the four sides of the Work Area.

The Work Area is the gray window in the center of the screen where you can drag-and-drop digital images. Individual images open in their own image Windows.

The Tool Settings Panel opens automatically when any editing, drawing, or painting tool is selected from the toolbar.

The Photo Wizard automatically opens when you open a new photo. Use the Photo Wizard to touch up and publish any photo in just a few easy steps.

FotoFinish allows you to capture digital images from a variety of sources, including digital cameras, scanners, and removable media devices such as photo CDs and memory cards. After the transfer is complete, look for shortcuts to the photo under the My Albums folder in the Image Explorer.

You can use the program to organize images, and you can drag and drop images within the Image Explorer, open several albums at one time, and move or copy images by dragging these between albums. Within an album, you can browse, sort, rename, and add descriptions to your photos quickly and easily.

The program really shines with all the many "touch-up" tools you can use to fix digital images. With the Photo Wizard you can turn good photos into great photos. The Wizard takes you step-by-step through the most common editing tasks, including rotating, cropping, and publishing images. With the publishing tools, the program wizards will help you select the appropriate settings and templates for printing, e-mailing, or publishing photos to the web.

The program also supports various special effects you can apply to an image. You can also combine several photos into a new image, or create new graphics from scratch. You start with a blank canvas and then draw your own eye-catching graphics. The program provides all the tools found in professional paint programs, but FotoFinish goes further by providing an easy, intuitive interface.

Users of the SmartDraw drawing programs will find that by adding FotoFinish they will have extra power to design custom templates for printing or publishing digital images in custom frames and layouts. With over 50,000 clip art images and special symbols, and hundreds of templates, frames, and borders, SmartDraw provides endless possibilities for your photo publishing projects. With SmartDraw's special pricing for customers wishing to add the FotoFinish program to the SmartDraw program, this results in a very cost effective approach to integrating these two programs in one system.

Targeted Customers

With the proliferation of affordable digital cameras and scanners, and the increasing interest in digital video, this results in a greater need for easy-to-use software designed to support the enhancement of the images captured by these digital devices. Although FotoFinish certainly is no competition to Adobe's Photoshop, FotoFinish really is not intended to compete with this high-end, very expensive and very complex image editing program.

FotoFinish is a super program filled with many neat features most digital image editors will want to work with, and in addition, it has been created to be much more easy to use than working in Photoshop's dense interface.

The intuitive interface in FotoFinish has been designed with the typical, home digital camera and scanner user in mind, and offers a dazzling array of image editing tools in an attractively priced product that will certainly get the attention of any digital camera or scanner owner.

These important features are of course found in other image editor programs now on the market, and FotoFinish manages to pack into its program most all tools you will ever need to work on your digital images. While FotoFinish is certainly no Photoshop, FotoFinish certainly does provide tons of important digital image editing tools at a very attractive price. You will have to look hard and deep to find image editing functionality in Photoshop that is not found in FotoFinish, and at its super reasonable price, FotoFinish is a certainty for all who need to work on digital image files and who do not like the intimidating, steep learning curve found in Photoshop. This makes FotoFinish one of the most valuable digital image editor programs, and especially valuable for those who may just beginning to work their digital cameras and image editing programs.

About SmartDraw.com

SmartDraw.com is the Internet's #1 provider of business graphics software. Profitable since its founding in 1994, the company attributes its success to one fundamental design principle: Keep it simple.

SmartDraw.com offers three products to boost business productivity: the flagship SmartDraw program for creating business diagrams; FotoFinish for editing, designing, and printing digital photo projects; and VisualScript XML for visually developing XML.

Recognized as the Best From the very beginning, www.smartdraw.com and its products have been recognized as "best in class," and the awards and acclaim just keep rolling in. www.smartdraw.com and the SmartDraw product line have been awarded:

People's Choice Award, 2003 SIAF Technology Fast 50, 2003, Deloitte & Touche Inc 500 Award, 2002, Inc Magazine Best Business Program, 2002 SIAF People's Choice Award, 2001 SIAF/CNET Smart Choice Award, 2001, Smart Computing Magazine Best Business Program, 2000, PC Magazine / SIAF Best Business Program, 1997, SIAF Best Business Program, 1996, PC Magazine / SIAF Best Graphics Program, 1995, SIAF

SmartDraw has successfully pioneered an innovative business model. Their patented technology integrates the Internet with desktop software to provide superior products and unmatched service to our customers. Their web sites offer expert-written tutorials, professional examples, ready-made templates, and over 50,000 downloadable images to help users complete their projects quickly and easily. All of these resources are also directly accessible from within their desktop software.

All customers enjoy 24-hour access to their own private, on-line accounts, where they can manage their invoices, share files with colleagues, and download software (including free updates and add-ons).

The SmartDraw software products are so easy to use that they barely generate any support requests. That's why their expert, in-house tech support is always free, not only for licensed owners, but also for trial users. When you consider that over 300,000 new users install their free trial software each month, this is a phenomenal indicator of reliability.

Recognized by Deloitte & Touche as one of the 50 fastest-growing technology companies in Southern California, and by Inc magazine as one of the 500 fastest growing private companies in America, SmartDraw receives over two million web visitors per month, placing it in the top 0.1% of the most visited sites on the Internet.

As an indicator of growing market share, SmartDraw already counts more than half of the Fortune 500 among its customers, and an attractive Enterprise licensing program is winning new corporate converts every day. SmartDraw stands out as a software firm that is thriving in today's challenging marketplace. Privately held by its founders and employees, with no debt and no outside funding, SmartDraw continues to enjoy a rocketing annual growth rate and a profitable bottom line.

Install and Setup

Installation and setup should proceed with no problems.

Price

$  69.00 FotoFinish Basic
$  99.00 FotoFinish STUDIO
$129.00 FotoFinish SUITE

Contact the company for additional information on pricing for more licensed users of FotoFinish.

Minimum System Configuration Requirements

Pentium processor or better
Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, or XP
30MB - 700MB free hard disk space (depending on images you install)

Contact

SmartDraw.com
9909 Mira Mesa Blvd., Suite 300
San Diego, California 92131
858-225-3300
FAX 858-549-2830
mail@smartdraw.com
service@smartdraw.com
www.fotofinish.com
www.smartdraw.com