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Fashion a Windows multimedia suite for cheap

A recent review of Corel Digital Studio 2010 got me close and personal with the consumer-oriented multimedia suite. Corel's studio excelled at providing a consistent, unified look, navigation, and toolset across its applications for editing photos and videos, making movies, burning content, and playing videos. It also copies photos, videos, and music to your mobile device, and can create photo projects like photo books and cards.

All good stuff, but it doesn't come cheap. Multimedia suites like this will put you out about $100. They're worth the price if you frequently use the tools, or if you vastly prefer the convenience and accessibility of a consumer-friendly setup. However, if you don't mind being scrappy, you can cobble together a spread of multimedia tools--your own "suite"--for next to nothing.

Edit and create

Photo editing, video editing, and making movies are the three largest focal points of multimedia suites like Corel Digital Studio 2010 and Roxio Creator 2010 (unfortunately, no download trial is available for the latter). Google's Picasa is one of my favorite freeware tools for casual users, and one of the closest direct matches to what's offered in a multimedia suite. Its uses are multifarious: organizing your photos and videos into albums, editing images and videos, sharing online, creating projects like collages and movies, and ordering prints.

The image-editing tools are serviceable, with red-eye removal, one-click lighting fixes, cropping and straightening, and finer tools for addressing blemishes and lighting. There are also 12 effects, like sepia tones and soft focus. This contrasts with Picasa's low-grade video editor, which can at least rotate videos and trim them. The movie maker has many more controls, but is basic; it doesn't build in the polished templates of a premium program. Picasa does, however, offer to sell you prints from a choice of providers (choice is good), and can help create a collage.

For standalone photo editing, the freeware applications FastStone Image Viewer, IrfanView, Paint.NET, and GIMP range in features from the accessible to the powerful. Read more about them in this resource guide.

Vista and Windows 7 users can try out Microsft's new Windows Live Movie Maker (review), freeware that can slap photos and video clips into a new movie in seconds. Deeper controls let you tweak transitions, captions, and effects after the automation. Editing tools include splitting, trimming, and applying fade points. As a point of comparison, video editors in these consumer-focused multimedia suites are better-equipped, perhaps with audio-tuning tools and features to adjust video lighting.

Creating calendars and photo books are a DIY project within your reach if you have an excellent photo printer and a home bookbinding kit. Otherwise, you can spend your energy on the editing and captioning and get a project printed somewhere else. Retail shops, like FedEx Office in the U.S., will print projects. Online photo albums and services like Shutterfly, Snapfish, and Zazzle will also gladly accept your business. The 12-month calendars run from $15 to $20; large photo books are often in the mid-$30 range (online services often charge for shipping). Corel Digital Studio is similarly priced.… Read more

Entry-level media suite

Those seeking a basic multimedia editing and production suite will find a solid, attractive studio in Corel Digital Studio 2010. The four main applications include the photo studio, video studio, DVD-burning app, and WinDVD 2010, Corel's video player. With these apps, you can open media from just about anywhere, edit videos and photos, and fashion a whole lot of photo and video projects, like collages, cards, calendars, and photo books. The video studio has a built-in movie maker that looks good and is approachable for novices looking to get their feet wet. There are a few templates (but a … Read more

Corel Home Office 1.0: Netbook-friendly

Try it | Full review

This week, Corel came out with a brand-new suite of office applications for XP, Vista, and Windows 7 users. Corel Home Office ($69.99) bundles in three applications: Write, the word processor, Calculate, the spreadsheet maker, and Show, the presentations builder.

Corel Home Office differs from other Corel office suites in two ways. First, it's been written with a new code base, so it's not a perfect continuation of Corel WordPerfect Office. It doesn't hurt that the suite is the near-spitting image of Microsoft Office 2007 in layout and design.

Second, it has … Read more

Midrange Microsoft alternative

Corel Home Office has much to recommend it, but this new productivity suite isn't for everyone. It was never meant to be. Smaller in size, lighter in features, and with certain optimizations built-in for small-screen resolutions, Corel Home Office is squarely aimed at Netbook owners, and among them, home users--both casual consumers and those operating home businesses.

The program's familiar layout emulates Microsoft Office 2007 with tabbed menus and a clean, visual display in all three applications--Write, Calculate, and Show. Its leaner feature set contains all the basic and intermediate features you'd expect in word processing, spreadsheet, … Read more

Photoshop plug-in puts artists on notice

Whether it's rescuing a photo mucked up by a camera's image processing or boosting interest in an otherwise stale photo, Alien Skin's Snap Art 2 plug-in for Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements aims to let users quickly turn mouse clicks into brush strokes.

The software announced and made available Monday gives users 10 natural media, hundreds of styles (oil paint, watercolor, pencil , pastels, etc.), and several canvas textures. The example above was done using the Impasto selection, giving it the look of thick paint, which would be great for hiding photo flaws. There are more than 700 … Read more

Three free alternatives to pricey graphics software

Why spend big bucks on graphics software when you can get many, if not most, of the same features from freeware? Here are three mui-expensive graphics apps and their free counterparts:

Adobe Illustrator Available for Windows only, Creative Docs .NET (yeah, weird name) is a vector-based graphic design tool for creating illustrations, manuals, flow charts, icons, and the like. It offers advanced features like Bezier curves, styles, convert-to-curves, and curved-path text. Adobe Photoshop You've actually got two choices here: GIMP, which is available for all platforms, and Paint.NET, which is Windows-only. Both programs offer powerful, Photoshop-caliber image-editing tools, … Read more