15-Minute Reviews :: Wondershare Scrapbook Studio v1.1.0

Hello everyone and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Wondershare Scrapbook Studio version 1.1.0 by Wondershare Software – An application to create your own scrapbooks without the scissors and glue.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Wondershare Scrapbook Studio is the fun and easy way to create compelling digital scrapbooks that make people say “WOW”. With an easy-to-use design space, sophisticated tools, and fabulous scrapbook design styles, you’ll assemble your precious photos into an artistic compilation in no time! Then, share your scrapbook creations with friends and family in an exciting variety of high-quality print and digital formats.”

Quick Pros

• Interface is functional – Not a lot to it
• Layer manager handy for finding different components of a busy page
• Pretty quick for building a page
• Was fun to play with even though simple
• Publish function gives a lot of output options

Quick Cons

• Not decent collection of templates
• Letter, Legal, Tabloid paper sizes not present – Seems to be a bug with paper size
• Frames (On Edit tab) do not like to drag and drop
• Doesn’t offer a lot of options – Doesn’t feel very powerful

Expansion

Scrapbooking is still very popular to this day. I myself know a lot of people who do scrapbooking manually and I know a few of them have mentioned that they wanted a program to help them at some level with this hobby. This application gives the ability to build the entire page (print or otherwise) or help you build elements for your scrapbook.

While the interface is extremely minimal and doesn’t offer a lot of options for elements such as WordArt; No effects and such, I did have some fun messing around with it; Adding photos and fun clipart (Clipart is limited – Only a few per category.) and messing with a design layout; I would be more likely to use this to build parts to a scrapbook for cutting out and playing with externally. While I did mention that WordArt and text is a little weak – It is still powerful enough to be used solely by itself to save on those pricey lettering you get for scrapbooking.

A function I was surprised to see here was the layers manager. With scrapbooking, you can end up with a lot of overlapping elements, and rather than fighting to get the right one clicked to edit or move, you can simply come over to the layers manager and work from there; This did alleviate my concerns about no arrangement tools (Send to back, bring forward, etc.) completely. I was also delighted to see a wide array of publishing options; Someone could in theory use this to build an ‘image’ template for website design, or send it off to friends by email and more.

I did find the application, while touting ‘hundreds’ hundreds of clipart files (Which still is a bit thin), there really is a limited amount of templates (14 in total). I also found that there wasn’t a lot of the common paper types for North America (Legal, Letter, Tabloid) – At least the application offers the ability to choose your own custom size. One bug I did see was in the drop-down for page size was a series of black box characters after some of the entries in the drop-down. It didn’t appear to affect those selections or any selection around it; Just seemed to be there. I also found that the frames on the ‘Edit’ page would not drag and drop onto the page like the clipart would (Unless you accidentally dragged it onto another frame already on the page.)

Final Verdict

I may seem critical about this application; I am a graphic design artist by day and I am used to a much more powerful suite of tools. That said, even with the quirks I found with the application, it really isn’t too bad. Even if you’re looking for a way to cut down on your cost of scrapbooking and you do a lot, you likely could really benefit from the text portions (including wordart) and the different frames, masks and effects for images. I enjoyed messing around with the application and found it was a lot of fun, even with its simplicity (Maybe that was the fun in it). While free, any scrapbooker should swoop this up quickly while they can. As for paying $39.95, I would look at it from a savings aspect or even a tool aspect. How many pages do you make? How much do you spend on scrapbooking supplies? If you do a lot of scrapbooking and like the application, I can see it being worth $39.95 to someone who needs a little more control or who would like to start making digital scrapbooks. It is definitely cheaper (and far easier) than Microsoft Publisher, Adobe Photoshop or the numerous other applications out there. I would definitely recommend this first over any of these other titles for a scrapbooker.

Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, June 29, 2007