When you've been doing anything for a long period of time, it takes something really special to impress you. Having first started working with
computers in 1980, I'll admit that I have seen some pretty neat things over the years, but when I saw PhotoMontage. from Arcsoft., I literally said, "WOW!"
From the beginning
I knew when I looked at the box I was holding something that was like nothing else. It isn't a game, it isn't another drawing program or financial program-this program will do the coolest thing I have seen in years.
You may or may not have seen them on posters, magazine covers or advertisements, but the latest craze to hit the computer visual scene since those Stereograms that made everyone's eyes hurt staring at them
is the montage. The Second College Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary defines a montage as *the art, style or process of making one pictorial composition by closely arranging or superimposing many pictures or
designs.* Making a montage by hand can be quite time consuming and requires having hundreds of designs or pictures to create. While the result is truly spectacular, wouldn't it be nice if there was a computer
program that would allow you to scan in a picture, click a few buttons with your mouse and then create a montage from the over 20,000 images that are included? And wouldn't it be even better if there was an easy way to
add your own pictures to the collection of micro-images that are used to make the montage? That is exactly what Arcsoft has done.
From passing my *don't read the manual unless you need to* test with flying
colors to working so smoothly and effortlessly with very professional results, my hat is off to Arcsoft. PhotoMontage is the coolest thing I have seen for computers since ink jet printers. And just think, the example on
this page is in black and white. Wait until you see what it does with color.
I don't think there is anyway that they could have made the software any simpler as the main screen has just a few buttons for
each thing you want to do.
To Create you either click on Get Photo to load the photo you want; Edit Photo to crop or brighten or fix the picture you will make into a montage or Build Montage to start the
program creating your montage. To View the picture you can either view the original photo, the montage, or the montage in detail so you can see all of the micro pictures that it is made of.
For output you
can Save your montage, Print it or go to Cool Stuff where you can have a poster made or buy more micro-image collections. That's all of the controls there are in the main section.
Of course it gets a little
more involved to start adding your own micro-pictures or if you start cropping and editing pictures, but not much more. I will also mention that PhotoMontage is just one of ArcSoft's *building blocks of digital imaging*
which includes the ZipShot. video capture device as well as other software that I will review in this column at a later time.
The system requirements include a minimum of 16 Megs of RAM and 20
Megs of free hard drive space. You can, however, make the program run faster and you can do more complex montages with more RAM and more hard drive space. Photo Montage sells for $79.95
