Trying to find good scrapbooking software is always a challenge. And if you love scrapbooking as much as I do, you are trying out any program you can get your hands on.
I recently discovered Lumapix: FotoFusion – for digital scrapbooking.
Lumapix is a software program that can be used at home or professionally to make incredible artwork using digital photographs. I downloaded the free trial to see what it was all about. Talk about cool!
FotoFusion is available in three different versions: Standard, Pro and Studio.
Apparently scrapbookers use the standard version. Professional photographers seem to use the studio version. And Pro seems reserved for web designers and photograhy enthusiasts, though in fairness I think anyone can use any of the versions they choose.
After downloading the free trial, I was impressed with how quick the installation was. Less than a minute and I was ready to use the program. When it first opened, it immediately checked for updates – which is always appreciated from me!
The program itself was amazing. It did take me several minutes to navigate my way around and learn what I was doing, but I had a bunch of fun doing it!
There are templates that come with the program and then you can also make up your own. I started with a template and it was so easy to just drop my photos in where I wanted them, edit the text on the page and poof I was done. Super easy!
Some of the finer points of FotoFusion are:
Direct connectivity to participating labs
- Professional photographers can upload their layouts, including original images, to participating labs for output. The labs can retouch individual images and then process out the completed layouts for printing. [STUDIO only]
New Multipage support
- Design an entire album in a single project [STUDIO only]
- Think Powerpoint as compared to Photoshop.
Patent-pending automatic collage layout and tuning
- Produce a unique arrangement for a selection of pictures with a single click . No more fussing around with templates (although FotoFusion supports templates as well!).
- Tweak compositions with interactive control over cropping, sizing, rotation, etc.
Precision control over text, borders, backgrounds, and shadows
- Add TrueType text, with support for EXIF information (camera make / focal length / etc).
- Give images ‘jagged’ borders and mattes, color-correct interactively, set to greyscale or sepiatone, blur images, or make them transparent.
- Add drop shadows and interactively control their size and placement.
- Add a tiled backgrounds and scale or blur it interactively.
Unique sharing capabilities – email and web galleries
- Mail compositions to friends or customers as ultra-efficient images embedded directly in the email – fit pictures from an entire wedding into a single 200K mail!
- Publish collages and source images to your own web page – a gallery with a unique ‘clickable’ interactive front page that matches your existing web page styles.
Power printing support – home to grand format
- Print at exceptionally large sizes and high resolutions – producing anything from 8×10 images to posters and banners [PRO] to grand format output [STUDIO]
- The quality of the original images is preserved at all output sizes, and text/borders/shadows are all rendered at the final output resolution for pristine quality.
All I can say is that this has got to be my top pick for digital programs for scrapbookers! It’s so easy and fun to use. Click here to get a FREE TRIAL. It’s totally worth it.