Click onto Your Family Photo

	Up till now, preserving your family photos on your computer has been an arduous and expensive task. Now with a few low-cost tools, even a novice can become a photo retoucher with the click of a button.

EasyPhoto & Photo Reader

	We all love to take pictures and share them with family and friends. Traditionally, there have been three ways to capture these images for electronic use: a service bureau, a Kodak PhotoCD, or your own optical scanner. Before these options became affordable, you had to find a printers' service bureau in your area to scan photos for use as computer graphics. In fact, this is still the preferred way to capture extremely high-quality photographs for color publication. The method involves using an expensive drum scanner, which spins the photo at a high speed over an optical pickup. An affordable alternative is to use a service, which will develop your roll of film and return the prints to you, along with the photographs, on a floppy disk.
	Kodak made the PhotoCD alternative available to the mass market by using writeable compact discs and high-quality scanning equipment. You can now get your film turned into PhotoCDs at almost any Kodak developer, although many of them send out your film for processing, which can take up to a week unless you pay for a rush order. Almost all CD-ROM drives can read PhotoCDs, or you can buy a set-top PhotoCD viewer that plugs into your television for slide shows. The developing cost for PhotoCD varies, usually between 50 cents and $1.00 per exposure.

Do-It-Yourself

	An increasingly attractive option is to “roll your own” photos using a personal color scanner. While black-and-white (grayscale) scanners are less expensive, the price of quality color scanners has also continued to drop. The least expensive alternative is still the hand scanner, which you use like an oversized mouse to manually roll down a page. The limited width of a hand scanner (around four inches) doesn't cause a problem with typical snapshots, but it can be cumbersome for reading entire pages, since you have to stitch the partial scans together. Hand scanners are also quite tricky to control manually -- you need the steadiest of hands.
	Now there's a faster and easier way to put those photos into your computer, and keep them organized. Storm Technologies' new EasyPhoto software, coupled with a small companion color scanner called Photo Reader, offers a low-cost method for digitally reproducing your color photos and inserting them into your document. Once your photo is read into your PC, you can apply powerful photo-retouching tools to color adjust, filter, clean-up, and even alter the photograph without using an expensive photographic laboratory.
	The Photo Reader scanner combines the convenience of a sheet-fed scanner with the low cost and convenience of a hand scanner. In effect, it's a hand scanner mounted on a motorized feeder. You can even detach the scanner module from the feeder to scan manually from books and magazines. While it also has a limited width of a little over four inches, that's plenty of room for most photographs.
	Storm emphasizes that the Photo Reader is not a scanner, although technically speaking, it is. True, the Photo Reader is not a general purpose image scanner -- you can't choose to scan grayscale or black-and-white line art -- but the single-minded focus on photographs is actually a real plus. It's a treat to have a device that operates with push-button simplicity, instead of the complex switch settings and software modes needed with a hand scanner. After you've installed the EasyPhoto software, you simply plug the included cable into your printer port and then plug your printer into the EasyPhoto  connector. You plug the AC adapter into the wall, and plug the other end into the EasyPhoto printer port connector. (This was quite a puzzler to me at first -- I searched in vain for a power socket on the Photo Reader before I discovered that it plugged into the printer port connector.) The printer port connection means you don't have to open your case and worry about IRQ or DMA settings.
	When you're ready to capture a photograph, just insert it face up at the front of the machine and run the EasyPhoto software.
	You can also use EasyPhoto software with photographs and clip art already on your hard drive, with Kodak PhotoCD, or with TWAIN-compatible sheet-fed or flatbed scanners.
	The Photo Reader is also TWAIN compatible, so you can also read a picture directly into applications that support TWAIN scanning, including most graphics and desktop-publishing packages.

Collecting and Organizing

	To read a picture, click on the EasyPhoto icon and press Start on the Photo Reader. You instantly see the picture on your screen as it's being scanned. If you like the results, you can add it to the Photo Gallery, a handy feature in EasyPhoto. The Gallery, which holds pictures in a sequence like a strip of film, is a convenient way to organize your pictures. In addition to the photos you scan with the Photo Reader, you can organize all your other clip art and graphics in the Gallery, too. Pictures are stored in the JPEG format, which uses less hard-drive space than any other type of graphic image. The Gallery floats on top of all other windows, so it doesn't get buried. To use a photograph, you just start your word processor or desktop-publishing software, then drag and drop the photos from the Gallery to the document. (Some programs aren't fully compatible with this method, but the standard Copy/Paste technique works just as well.)
	If your picture-taking skills need a little help, you'll like the basic photo editing features built into EasyPhoto. Just double-click on a photo to open an Image Editor session, where you can brighten/darken, adjust color, remove scratches, crop, or select a portion of a photo.

A Visual Tour of EasyPhoto

	You needn't be intimidated by the idea of photo retouching. Although complex programs like Adobe Photoshop cost hundreds of dollars and require lots of training. EasyPhoto lives up to its name by providing just the basics. 

CONTACT INFORMATION
EasyPhoto (software) $49.00
Bundled with Photo Reader (hardware) $249.00
Storm Technologies, Mountain View, CA
Phone: (415) 691-6696