What is Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2.0?

PhotoDeluxe, the consumer image editing offering from Adobe, lets you retouch, manipulate, and otherwise twist digital photos for cheap — once you understand the unusual (yet improved) interface. Keep in mind the price and the phrase “consumer offering;” it’s the basis for why Adobe made PhotoDeluxe so different from other Mac applications.

Forget about menus, and don’t even think about a floating tool palette. PhotoDeluxe’s interface looks more like a Web browser or a Macromedia Director interface than a Mac app. The program takes over your screen, adding its own background and putting up a series of buttons and tabs. These are designed to walk you through specific tasks (say, making a greeting card out of a family photo), instead of letting you work in a freeform environment with a bunch of tools and a palette. Adobe spent a lot of time analyzing what consumers want from digital photos and how they go about getting it. The company adjusted PhotoDeluxe to reflect what it learned.

The five buttons on the left side of the screen — Get Photo, Special Effects, Cards & More, Internet, and Send — appear in the order in which you most likely will need them. First get a photo, then touch it up, make something with it, and send it (either through the Internet or to the hard drive). Once you become accustomed to working in this fashion, the interface makes a lot of sense, but it’s a tough transition for dyed-in-the-wool Adobe Photoshop users. Then again, PhotoDeluxe does not purport to replace Photoshop.

PhotoDeluxe 2.0 doesn’t tie you to choosing between guided activities and free-form work, as PhotoDeluxe 1.0 did. Instead, clicking on a button brings up some tabs that contain tools arranged in a step-by-step order, without mandating that order. The addition of the Advanced button lets you access some of the more familiar (and potent) Photoshop tools. There is some serious power here — Adobe uses lots of Photoshop code in PhotoDeluxe.

PhotoDeluxe 2.0’s great new features include red-eye removal; a Clone tool (for duplicating parts of an image); editable, rotatable, and sizable text; and several photo manipulation tools. These features, especially the Clone tool addition, make PhotoDeluxe 2.0 much richer than version 1.0. Of course, some other additions, such as image management, aren’t so great. PhotoDeluxe uses the EasyPhoto Organizer, which catalogs files in galleries. The problem is that the gallery files included with PhotoDeluxe point to images on the PhotoDeluxe CD, so unless the CD is in the drive, the sample photos and dip art are not accessible.

Another downside, PhotoDeluxe takes up a lot of hard disk space. A minimal install occupies more than 70MB of space, and that does not include the photo galleries induded with the program. Also, it takes some time to get used to opening and saving files using galleries.

PhotoDeluxe is not Photoshop. Repeat this mantra if you are a Photoshop user picking up PhotoDeluxe 2.0. It will be a frustrating experience. If, however, you’re new to digital images and simply want to play around with pictures, PhotoDeluxe will suffice, especially for the $49 price tag.

Reynolds, David. (March 1998). PhotoDeluxe 2.0. MacAddict. (pg. 66).

Download Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2.0 for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver