DTWSoftware, a division of DTW Associates, Inc., has released PhotoDub Album(tm) (PDA), a Windows application for digital picture management and presentation that allows you to organize your digital pictures into a talking picture album for presentation and sharing. With PDA, you can group your pictures into categories of your choice for easy retrieval and management, edit your pictures with commonly used image editing tools, and add audio and text to your pictures for presentation or reminder.

With digital pictures, you cannot annotate with text as you can for printed pictures. PDA and its predecessor, PhotoDub(tm), are unique among all picture editing and management software. PDA allows you to record, insert and mix audio files and add to the pictures, and add text to the picture. Pictures can then be grouped and saved in albums for sharing or for presentation with its own standalone player. A single picture with voice can also be prepared and sent by e-mail with its own player. High voice and video compression programs are used to reduce file size for quick Internet transmission of the audio+picture files.

With the unique audio editing tools, you can record, insert, delete and mix audio recordings. For example, personalized greetings can be prepared without complete re-recording of the message. Additional audio editing tools allow you to create echo, fade-in, and fade-out and allow you to normalize, increase or decrease volume of segments or all of the recordings.

Text can be added to the pictures. Text annotation tools include Font types, sizes, colors and styles (bold, italic and underlined) and fill colors (including transparency). Multiple text boxes can be created and moved to the locations of your choice.

For picture management, PDA allows you to search your pictures by browsing or by using all or part of the file name as search criteria. Pictures are then collected in a Master Album in thumbnail views. The pictures in the Master Album can be grouped into categories, edited to improve or change image quality, and/or edited by adding audio or text. One or more groups in the Master Album can be saved as an individual album, and various albums can be merged to form a new album. Pictures may also be framed with frames of various designs.

Image/picture editing tools commonly used are available, such as image enhancement, adjustments of contrast and brightness, red eye removal, cropping and rotating.

PDA allows you to acquire pictures directly from digital cameras or scanners, and to make screen shots of the images on your monitor which can be cropped to the desired size.

With the text and audio editing tools, the image acquisition tools and the Album Player, PDA can be used easily to create professional presentation of images with text and audio in minutes.

Extensive controls are provided in the Album Player. The picture can be advanced manually or advanced according to the Album advance default time, the advance time set for each picture or the advance time based the length of the audio file.

Whether you are a professional or amateur photographer, PhotoDub Album gives you easy-to-learn tools to create albums for presentation with audio and text quickly. PhotoDub Album can also be used by professionals to quickly prepare presentations of images with audio and text.

PhotoDub Album runs under Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP and requires a Pentium or faster processor. A single-user license costs $34.99(US) and may be purchased securely online at http://www.dtwsoftware.com. You can download a 30 day trial version of PhotoDub Album(TM) from the same Internet address.