Noromis Photo Lab does the automatic editing on your selected photos by analyzing five aspects of the photo: exposure, contrast, color balance, color saturation, and sharpness. The program then makes the appropriate adjustments to the image and displays the resulting fixed photo. Automatic red-eye reduction and noise reduction are also available, and you can fix single photos or groups of photos. There’s also an option to use a split screen view to see the before and after images. The original image file is intact, and the adjustments are only applied to the displayed image and the printed image. If desired, you can save the edited image as a separate file and preserve the original image; otherwise only the adjustments that were applied to the image will be saved and applied the next time that image is displayed or printed.

Noromis Photo Lab really shines in the quality of the printed photo, getting the best out of whichever printer you’re using. A program Wizard walks you through an initial printer setup and calibration. These settings will then be applied to future prints, or you can customize settings for each print job. You can also choose final print size as the standard 3 x 5, 4 x 6 inch and the like or print a custom size and then print single or multiple prints on a page.

Other options for sharing photos include e-mail, creating a PDF slide show or burning a CD/DVD. Using the e-mail option you can choose to resize the photos for easy sending. The PDF slide show is especially useful, since those to whom you send the show can view it using the free, easily-available Adobe Acrobat viewer.

Cropping photos is easy: just select the size of the final print, such as 4 x 6 inch, and a fixed ratio rectangle representing the cropped part appears over the photo. Then adjust the size and position of the rectangle by dragging with your mouse and crop--that easy.

If you choose to exercise more control over your photo fixes, you can touch up the auto-fixes. Exposure, contrast, color balance, color saturation, and sharpness can all be refined, if desired. An especially useful fine tuning can be done in relation to skin tones. Here you can smooth complexion (wrinkle reduction), brighten skin tone and/or adjust skin hue - no more green faces.

Help comes from an especially comprehensive 58-page printed manual, on-line help on the www.Noromis.com Web site and free phone technical support (to registered users).

The program is easy to use and produces great prints.

Ciao Bella: la Bella Romanza (***) is a casual, somewhat free-form fun game exploring the life and choices of a young career woman, Elena, as she navigates her work, life, love life and family. Your job as you guide her along is to see to her happiness, success, health and fulfillment.

These goals are not always easy, since her life and her friends’ and relatives’ lives are full of problems. Elena has choices to make and must deal with the consequences. For example, her sister wants to call off her wedding because of an argument with her fiancé. Should Elena intervene, or should she stay away from the problem(s) and see to her own health and happiness? And if she does decide to help patch things up, how should she do it? Most of the problems and choices are text dialogues between Elena and the person she is talking to. Elena (you) have a choice of responses, and each one will have its own consequences to deal with. The game will be different, depending on these choices, and you can play at 13 different levels.

Game play is easy, with colorful 2-D graphics depicting Elena’s town. Choose to go to her work places, the gym, church, home, the mall or any other place, and there are different challenges in each and different choices to make. As you go along, you’ll have to make sure Elena gets proper rest, exercise and food to maintain her physical health and that she chooses proper spiritual and cultural activities to keep her emotional life in harmony.