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FxFoto is an intermediate level photo editing application, available through Triscape Inc, and downloadable from the website www.fxfoto.com The Creative Edition comes with digital scrapbooking kits provided by Scrap Outside the Box digital designers. FxFoto was developed as photo editing software so it includes photo organization and the usual photo editing tools. What sets it apart is the ease of use and the ability to make collages, which makes it easy to make digital layouts. For the Creative edition a number of scrapbooking features like filters and cropping in shapes has been added also.
On the box, FxFoto promises – - Organize
- Import
- Search
- Enhance
- Annotate
- Email
- Upload
- Archive
- Publish
- Collages
- Slide Shows
- Scrapbooking
Unlike
other high-stream photo editing software such as Photoshop, or Paint
Shop Pro, the interface for FxFoto is not as feature rich, but
appropriately is much easier to learn – especially for a newbie digital
scrapbooker, or someone looking to upgrade from a free version of
something and add on layering technology. I
got the fantastic opportunity to review a Creative Edition copy, along
with the chance to quickly put together some digital layouts using the
included kits. Being a Paint Shop Pro user, and more newly – struggling
with the learning curve on Photoshop Elements, I was wary of going into
the review with pre-impressions towards how a photo editor might
operate. I’ve struggled learning high-end software before, and was on
the lookout for something which would work quickly, and allow me to
utilise the many digital kits I’ve collected. Installation and the First Day The CD which comes in the box runs automatically to install, else run the setup.exe. The software is supported through Windows 98 / 2000 / ME / XP. The first install panel up gives you the option to run several video demonstrations also. I immediately took a look at some of these demos, starting off with the humorous one suggesting a competitor product was good, but expensive.
I then got caught up in the multimedia demonstrations of the photo album side of FxFoto – wow, I could produce slideshows to music, or a scrolling collage to music. Or a big photo gallery with an animated zoom down button to see each photo larger. Eventually I got around to actually installing the thing, once I got over my wonderment. The install system allows you to choose a few options, including putting example data into the My Pictures folder, and scanning your local disks for photographs. At a later time during installation, you have the option to install scrapbooking clipart – but this requires 400Mb of disc space. I wasn’t sure I had it, to be honest – and it turned out I did. After completion, I had the option to start the FxFoto Demonstration or not. Then you can have a real go from Start Programs. On first opening FxFoto, it scans for photos. Although I have previously tried out many photo album applications, and bought one, I normally don’t like the result. The scan for FxFoto took a long time, due mainly to the fact that I store so many digital scrapbooking elements and kits on my local drive (reminder to myself to burn these off to disk!) but I wanted to see what FxFoto picked up in the photo album. Some albums out there have problems with .png file formats or others, and this would be an issue for me if FxFoto also couldn’t show these digital files properly. Unfortunately, no png files are imported into the thumbnail panel during the initial scan. However, there is a way of getting to these afterwards – Choose Import, select the folder you want to re-import from, and check the subfolders option, and the png/gif files option also. The import then brings in those missing files into the folder structure in FxFoto. And once in, it gives an easy search feature, both in the left hand pane photo view, and via a Search icon. The folder panel and thumbnail views can be hefty, if, like me, you have lots of digital images on your drives. But it gives some nice options on right click to make finding your elements and photos easier – you can close down all the thumbnails to just show the folder names, and take it out of the default timeline view (showing photos in date order) and into alphabetical view. Ease of use is probably based on how you organise the folders and images on your drives. Once finished with this, I decided to try making a collage. From the left hand pane, I selected a couple of images, and then from the right I had an option to choose the collage background. This initially browses to the scrapbooking clipart folders installed with FxFoto – here I found a selection of background papers and selected one. One of my photos was facing the wrong direction, so I also chose a mouse-click option to rotate it left. FxFoto also gave me the option to also rotate the left hand album thumbnail at the same time. I decided I didn’t like the look of the background chosen, so went back to the scrapbooking collection, and took a browse around the other themed collections – the Creative Edition comes with kits themed for a Baby, a Boy, a lovely Christmas collection, a heritage collection – with some great backgrounds, a harvest kit, and many more. These have been installed into the My Pictures folder, and from here you can easily browse upwards using the explorer window, and locate all of your other digital kits – backgrounds, elements etc. This large lot of kits, created by Scrap Outside the Box Designers seems a spectacular bonus for anyone looking at FxFoto. Once I’d found how easy it is to select from backgrounds and elements I was on my way to creating some quick layouts. The correct way to create a layout is summarised below – as FxFoto comes with scrapbooking layout sizes already prepared for you to simply start creating a layout from. Photo Editing ToolsFxFoto comes with various standard features also, with tabs and button options. Given the state of my digital photography skills, I selected one photo to try most of the features out on. Here’s the original, straight off my hard drive (Take note of the lovely red eyes, the huge blemish so successfully modelled by my husband and the cluttered background) 
Using the FxFoto tools, I applied the following – - Auto Improve (didn’t like that – too much lighting was given – so I used the Undo button – a digital scrapper’s best friend)
- Gamma correction to lighting, contrast and highlights – much better
- Redeye reduction – wow this is the best ever – simply stick a circle over the eye, and it’s changed to a nominated colour
- Rotated it
- Added a photo frame – in this case a set of photo corners
- Removed that blemish – the first attempt was a little big on standard settings, so I played around on this one.
- I then applied a filter from the filter tab option (which also contains the unsharp and sharpen filters) – this one is oil painting, which came out better than expected.
- I played around with the clone brush also, to clone out the people in the background, but I wanted to move onto real layouts.
Creating a Scrapbook Layout
- Click on the Collage button – lots of options will come up (some interesting ones –1. Join photos – yes, FxFoto has a stitching facility, often missing out of top-range photo editors; 2. Web site collage – publish collage slides to the internet; 3. Add button to collage – a clickable button in your collage; 4. Burn to CD)
- Choose New Collage or Theme button (even more options here – including a web slide show, a collage theme, a 2D or 3D scroll collage (ala Star Wars).
- Choose Multi-Photo Collage (Scrapbook Pages) button, then next
- You now have a choice of 12x12, 8x8, Printer Page Layout, or screen size layouts – you can make a wallpaper for your monitor in any standard size)
- If, like me, you choose a standard 12x12 to start off with, you then have an option on the window to browse to and locate the starter background image or fill. You can choose a 12x12 sized background paper from your hard-drive as a starter point, or FxFoto comes with some background fills like sand, to play around with.
- Press finish, and you have your first 12x12 page up, with the background layer. You can then go through the left hand pane of images and drag and drop on any elements and photos you want, resize and crop them to you own liking.
Support and the WebsiteThe website, www.fxfoto.com provides more information on FxFoto and includes an online gallery, a tutorial section, an FAQ section, an animated tour, and the page to download the software from. You can also download a free viewer which will provide a slideshow without the ability to create FxFoto files. The programme, plus variations such as a full media edition, can also be purchased from this site, using appropriate payment software. And it’s only $49.95 US – that’s around the £30 mark, I believe. The gallery itself is worth a look at also. And soon, FxFoto instructions will be provided against some of the layouts. Susan White, the contact person for Triscape also provided a demonstration of FxFoto at the first ever Digital Scrapbooking Convention held in October of this year, and has provided the instructions that she handed out at this convention for the making of a layout using FxFoto. I am attaching those to this review for you. SummaryFxFoto does what it promises on the box. It has enough features to allow an interest from seasoned digital scrapbooker like myself. Whereas I enjoy playing around with the various features found in higher (and more expensive) photo editors such as Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro, FxFoto allowed me the ability to simply drag and drop to create layouts using premade and bought digital backgrounds and elements quickly and easily. In fact, in one simple afternoon I managed to create five digital layouts of photos which previously would have gone without a layout home. It was quick and no mess. And from these layouts, profiled below, I then went onto create a custom slideshow of the layouts. I was tempted to publish this one to the web, or email to some friends, but instead decided to burn the show as an animated presentation (with music) to CD Rom and gift the CD as a present to my in-laws for Christmas. Easy, huh? If you have tackled trying to learn more feature rich and expensive photo editors, like me, you might struggle with the ins and outs of how to create your first layout. Susan has provided the instructions to a layout creation for us to help out; and the FxFoto website itself will also be providing more and more guidance. For newbie digital scrappers, or people considering all their digital photographs – and what on earth they are going to do with them – FxFoto provides a low cost and working alternative than attempting to learn a top-range photo editor. It also has a combination of features which make it a generally excellent option to contemplate – stitching of scanned photos, the photo thumbnail pane, drag and drop scrapbooking creation, and multi-media publishing options for your creations. Despite owning, and still using several other photo editors, I was impressed enough with the features provided by FxFoto – especially how easily it allowed me to create layouts, and publish them onto CD, that I have upgraded my 15 day evaluation edition to buy the programme myself.
What I Created in an AfternoonLayout No 1 : Forest Sitting I started off wondering how easy it might be to use a quickpage from a digital designer – these come all designed up as a flat file, with transparent “holes” for placing your photographs under. I used a beautiful and new quickpage by Carrie Stephens, called Good Times. I layered under three photos (one of which was incredibly blurred unintentionally so) and then augmented the layout with lettering and embellishments out of the Colours of Heritage kit created by Katie Mann and which came with the FxFoto package. Coincidentally the two worked together perfectly with the same colourings and sun-symbolism.
Layout 2 : November at CenterParcs I was enamoured by Katie Mann’s Colours of Heritage kit which came with FxFoto, so decided to use this as a background for another layout from the same photo range. All backgrounds on this aside from the exceptions, are from this kit. The green Hessian, leaf embellishment and N alpha come from Mo Jackson’s Zahra kit. I found it easy to crop the trendy circles out of backgrounds in FxFoto, and to keep the cropping line to easily create mats for the large photo. And the transparency brush allowed me to easily zap out some bits of the ribbons to allow for the inter-weaving of Katie’s ribbons in the corner.
Layout 3 : Monitor Wallpaper (1)
 Okay, so I got sick of creating layouts in the same day, so tried out the collage to create wallpapers. I chose a large pixel size of 1024x768, as I have 17inch monitors. The elements and backgrounds used on this layout are by Shir Benovich who has provided a kit for the FxFoto Creative Edition called simply “Bright Colors”
Yes, they are bright, and yes, this is on my screen as a background at the moment. The wallpaper facility is nice to use when creating a collage – I had intended creating a new background wallpaper for my computers for each month, with a calendar insert, and different scrapping layouts and ideas included. FxFoto makes it easy to select the right size already, and drag and drop on any backgrounds and elements I want. If you look really closely, you’ll notice that I’ve included the two layouts I’ve only just created today, as small thumbnails into this collage.
Layout No 4 : Family Safari Yes, a fourth layout in the same day – for me that’s a record. This layout covers some safari photos taken during the same holiday week as the layouts above. And I chose a kit entitled “Girl Power” by Clara Wallace, which again came in the boxed edition of FxFoto. A girly pink kit is not normally associated with zoo or animal photos, but I think this works okay.
Layout No 5 : Wallpaper (2) This one is destined for my work PC monitor – I didn’t want to splash it out too loudly, and wanted to use a calendar file on it, for organisational purposes. The background papers are by Lilach Oren, the November calendar is by Valarie Lemons (I’ve filled it in with family schedules), and I’ve peppered more layouts on it also. You can see that I took a liking to Clara Wallace’s Girl Power ribbon belt so much, that I re-used it on this wallpaper collage also, plus the poloraid frames around my layouts come from the same kit.
Review by Michelle Thompson Layouts jpegs in full size can be found on the UKScrappers gallery, and also that of my personal blog at Scrapability.
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