DIGITAL PHOTOS FOR
DUMMIES, HOME BUDGET FOR DUMMIES, FAMILY TREES FOR DUMMIES,
RESUMES & COVER
| | | | ___Personal Tech E-letter___ Washington Post personal technology columnist Rob Pegoraro answers reader e-mail and expands on themes he touches on in his weekly newspaper column. The e-mail version of this weekly feature includes links to the latest gadget and software reviews.
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LETTERS FOR DUMMIES, Atari/Anuman Interactive
For years, the Dummies series of guides, with its trademark yellow and black covers, has stuffed the shelves of bookstores, offering advice on everything from juggling to taxes. Now, Anuman Interactive, a Paris developer, is taking the Dummies concept onto your computer, more or less.
Each of these new titles -- in addition to the four reviewed here, Greeting Cards for Dummies and Typing Tutor for Dummies are available -- comes with both a reference booklet and a CD-ROM. (So, alas, you probably won't be seeing the likes of Digital Photos for Dummies at the mall anytime soon.) Most of the time, the booklet is the more useful half of the bundle, while the bland, unremarkable programs offer less value -- especially since there is so little integration between paper and CD.
In Digital Photos for Dummies, for example, the booklet contains all the advice on digital photography and discusses shot composition, lighting and printing.
The companion software is a fairly simple photo-editing and managing tool. It lets users download new photos from cameras, do some basic manipulation (for example, adjusting a shot's contrast, brightness and color saturation, removing red eyes and rotating and cropping the picture) and create albums of selected photos. Photoshop-level control this is not, but it's probably enough for a novice.
It does include a handy before-and-after feature that lets you see how your alterations to a photo changed it from the original. Another nice touch: the ability to create self-executing slide shows, complete with musical soundtracks, that can be run on any Windows machine. There's also an easy, step-by-step process that walks users though creating online photo collections, using a variety of supplied templates.
Family Tree for Dummies is a similar case: It will help you create a detailed, searchable chart of your family's ancestry, featuring birth and death dates, military service, education and addresses, as well as scanned-in photos and documents. Once you've entered data on a sufficient number of people, you can view a U.S. map showing where these relatives live, sort through family statistics and display a calendar containing key dates in your family's history.
