The increased popularity of low-cost color scanners has created the perfect market for an easy-to-use photo-manipulation application. Now, from Adobe, along comes PhotoDeluxe 1.0, a consumer-oriented image-editing package with a kiosk-style interface designed to hold novices’ hands, carefully avoiding Photoshop's legendary learning curve. And unlike its professional-class sibling, PhotoDeluxe comes with a wide variety of templates, photo images, and clip art designed with the consumer in mind.
Keeping It Simple
Like Photoshop, PhotoDeluxe offers hirers that can distort, sharpen, scale, and creatively manipulate photographic images; Photo Deluxe lets you use existing Photoshop-compatible plug-ins, too.
PhotoDeluxe can capture documents directly from desktop scanners using its TWAIN acquire module or a Photoshop-compatible plug-in supplied by the scanner manufacturer; it also imports directly from Apple's QuickTake and Kodak’s DC40 digital cameras. More important for small-office users, PhotoDeluxe can import and export a wide variety of formats, including Photoshop, GIF, JPEG, TIFF, PICT, EPS, BMP, and PCX — reason enough to warrant a purchase for some users.
At first glance, Photo Deluxe's interface looks more like a computer game than that of a digital-image-editing application. When you launch PhotoDeluxe, it hides the Finder and fills the screen with its own desktop.
If you’re familiar with the basics of image editing, you can work on your own, using traditional menus or a tab metaphor. Novices can use the Guided Activities feature to step through the various image-editing functions... If you're familiar with wizards in Microsoft applications you'll be right at home with this step-by-step process, although Adobe makes it a bit more visually appealing.
Colorful icons help you select creative options. You can quickly frame your favorite photo, or easily transform it into a calendar or greeting card, PhotoDeluxe's CD also comes with various templates for creating flyers, signs, and even faux magazine covers.
The Hold Photo feature lets you composite photos, functioning as a sophisticated scrapbook. It can give you seemingly magical powers. Imagine your friends' surprise when Sasquatch crops up in your family portraits!
A Family Resemblance
The PhotoDeluxe design team took an enormous risk in deviating from Apple's rigid user-interface guidelines. For the most part, the colorful, user-friendly style works well, albeit in a cobbled-together manner. But in more than a few situations, PhotoDeluxe's lineage is all too apparent; Photoshop-esque dialog boxes rear their ugly heads when you access many tools. In another application, this sort of code-borrowing wouldn’t be as obvious, but these plain-jane dialog boxes are a sharp contrast to the typically colorful look of PhotoDeluxe's interface. Even more disturbing, the tools still use Photoshop’s cryptic methods, complete with terminology sure to confuse users unfamiliar with high-end techniques.
PhotoDeluxe's help system is also far from ideal. Unlike integrated systems in competing packages, the help system is a separate application called Quick Help, Although the content is thorough, its definitely not consistent with the graphical nature of the rest of the interface. If Adobe is serious about creating a true consumer-level product, it needs to adopt a help system targeted to novice users, such as Apple Guide or balloon help. As an addition to Quick Help, various hints — called clue cards — pop up during the editing process. Seasoned users can disable the clue cards, either individually or as a group. Still, its a stopgap measure.
Sacrifice Play
Because PhotoDeluxe is geared to the consumer market, Adobe made a number of design compromises to make it usable on the low-powered, low-memory systems typically found in homes and small offices. Most notably, PhotoDeluxe doesn't offer the ability to work with multiple photos simultaneously.
Despite the sacrifices Adobe has made in the name of simplicity, you still need a CD-ROM drive and a 68040 processor to use PhotoDeluxe. And although the documentation recommends a memory partition of 8MB, test files caused the application to crash at this level. Increasing the memory setting to 12MB solved the problem — too bad most existing consumer Macs don't have that much RAM.
Adding insult to injury, PhotoDeluxe's performance is less than ideal on typical consumer-class systems. Some tools and filters are excruciatingly slow.
The Last Word
PhotoDeluxe isn't picture-perfect, but it is a suitable compromise between brute strength and grace. Its suite of tools is easy to use, and its templates are a welcome addition for home users who need a little creative boost.
PhotoDeluxe's low price and fun features make it a logical choice for the home user, but its flaws significantly limit its viability for business use. If you're using Photoshop simply as an import/export tool — and don’t need color-separation capabilities or other high-end features — you'll benefit from PhotoDeluxe's lower price.
Roberts, Blake. (April 1996). PhotoDeluxe 1.0. Macworld. (pg. 59).
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Applications
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adobe_photodeluxe.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
