Express Digital Darkroom
National Geographic Back Roads Explorer

August 11, 2004

Manage, Print and Sell Photos

Express Digital Darkroom (**** out of four) is a photo management and sales program with features designed for the professional or semi-pro photographer. Photos can be brought into the program from your computer’s hard drive, any TWAIN source (such as a scanner) or directly from a digital camera. The organizational features allow you to group your photos by specific events you’ve covered, such as wedding, ball game, reunion, and the like, and then subgroup within the group to better manage large numbers of photos. You can then archive these groups to CD for storage and/or later retrieval and add notes if needed.

Photo groups or subgroups can then be viewed as a slide show, printed as proof sheets or uploaded to your own or a commercial Internet storefront Web site provided by PhotoReflect. Using any of these methods, potential customers can view and order prints. The orders for prints can be automatically or manually entered into the program and the photos printed on your own printer or by a commercial photo lab. For your convenience, the program ties directly to Labtricity for photo printing your orders. An order status feature in the program tracks your orders and payments.

In addition to the photo management capabilities, the program has a built in photo editor that will help you correct many common exposure, color balance, cropping, orientation and other problems. One click enhancements include vignettes, text, B&W or sepia and duotones. You can create novelty items using the included borders and templates and add backgrounds using the green screen feature. Or you can open your own photo editor program right from within the program. Express Digital Darkroom is capable of opening and working with RAW, many proprietary and all standard camera file formats and will print directly to any Windows based inkjet or dye-sub printer.

Help is in the form of on-disk Quick Start Guide and a more comprehensive 100 page User Manual. The program is very straightforward in its use and will be a welcomed management tool to those who take and sell digital photos.

National Geographic Back Roads Explorer (****) includes TOPO! maps for all 50 states and is designed to appeal to hikers, hunters, fishermen, travelers, and outdoor enthusiasts. But anyone who needs outstanding topographical maps will also find the program very useful. This 17-disc set is filled with map information to help you find towns, lakes, streams, beaches, campgrounds, trails, landmarks, parks and more. The maps are from National Geographic and the USGS (United States Geological Survey) and offer 10 times the detail of a standard atlas.

You can use the maps as is from the program or add routing, text, symbols, digital or scanned photos, notes and web links. The maps can be viewed, printed, exported to a Palm or pocket PC or used with a GPS, with or without routes, notes and whatever you’ve added to them.

The welcome screen lists several options, including viewing a demo map, which shows U. S. National Parks, listed by state. Click on any park, and you’ll see a photo, description of the park and a link to the park website for more information. Other options let you start with a new map, browse existing maps, return to a previous map, set preferences and more.

It’s easy to go to maps of any state or area within a state or scroll seamlessly across states to browse any area. Guide boxes at the side of the screen show the area you’re viewing in relation to the state and the area of the U.S. If you’re looking for a specific location or type of area within a state, the maps are also searchable in a variety of ways: use the Gazetteer to find a named location, search by categories (waterfalls and rapids, state and national parks, hiking trails, cities and towns and the like), or with a GPS by using coordinate location, either latitude and longitude or UTM (Universal Transverse Mercator) values. And there’s a USA Place Finder, which offers more than one million GPS waypoints for popular locations.

Pull-down menus and a tool bar with pop-up tips make it easy to navigate the program. For example, if you want to find Lake Powell in Utah, just select Utah from the menu (you’ll usually be prompted to insert a disc containing maps of the state you want to view), press CTRL F(ind), enter Lake Powell, and it’s displayed on the map. Then use any of the menu or tool bar options to go to any of the other map options, such as those to create routes, measure distance, build elevation profiles, use a compass tool to measure direction and distance between points, and much more. The map details are impressive, whether you’re looking at streets in a town, lakes in an area or any other points of interest.

The program is easy to use, although it does take time to become familiar with the wealth of included features. There’s also a help menu to take you to a listing of the sections included in the comprehensive on-screen 49-page manual (which is also printable).

National Geographic Back Roads Explorer offers nearly 2,000 maps you can view, customize and print or download to use in whatever way best suit your needs. A very reasonable price for all this information.

From Topics Entertainment, Windows95+, $39.95.

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