Adobe PhotoDeluxe - Business Edition (APDB) is essentially a photo-enhancer type of graphic editor aimed at creating professional business stationary, direct mail pieces, Web graphics, and other common documents disseminated by a business entity. This software works with a set of hundreds of business-document templates and with clip art and photos that are either already stored as digital files or directly imported from scanners, digital cameras, and photo diskettes.

Stated system requirements are: Pentium (or compatible), Win95/NT4.0, RAM:32M, Hard-Drive:140M, and 256 color (for suitable photo enhancement). The APDB package came with a software CD, a second CD (Adobe promotional items and design-tips), and a slim ”Getting Started”manual. Price $79. Installation from the CD was simple and trouble free ... on my 486 (not Pentium) PC. APDB operations must be faster on a Pentium system, especially with MMX. But my 100 MHz PC had no trouble processing the APDB sample photos and clip art (under 6.5M) or with scanned 4x5 photos (under 1.6M for 16 bit color). True, processing response was not instantaneous. Most delays, however, were not overly annoying. Lots of RAM and hard-drive space (the 140M requirement) are required to accommodate the graphic manipulations in this software.

APDB contains a sizable compliment of photo enhancement tools. Over 130 photoenhancement options are available to manipulate and change the appearances of photos. Along with text, options are depicted by miniature photos representing the effects chieved. These options range from touch ups (like fixing overall color, red eye, dust impacts, etc.) to special effects ( like changing backgrounds, tinting, smudging, cloning, changing hue and saturation, etc.). The "Getting Started" manual does give general advice on the use of the options but, in the end, one needs a fair amount of practice to find and manipulating the APDB options with some ease.

To use the photo editing features of APDB, I scanned a number of color and of black-and-white (B&W) photos. For some reason, the B&W photos were transferred to APDB as negatives (???). This did not happen with a couple of other graphic-editing programs I have. However, APDB contains a ‘Negative’ option (ordinarily used with positive photos) which converted each transferred negative to a normal positive photo. The B&W photos were old and from newspapers. I was able to remove the effects of dust, scratches, poor tone renditions, Moré pattern, and poor overall image quality. In all cases the quality of the printed photo compared well with the original, despite the added printer halftones.

There were no problems with color photo transfers. I chose photos that needed improvement. The editing options of APDB let me correct for poor exposure due to excess background lighting, poor color rendition, red eye, poor color balance, and disturbing picture elements. Again, I ended up with photos that had improved qualities over those that I started with.

I tried letterhead and business-card templates. There were 26 styles each of cards and of letter heads to chose from. The templates are geared to the inclusion of some photo or graphic and, thus, one can include one's logo. The basic line and pattern design of a template can not be changed, but the text and graphic items provided as examples may be changed to tailor the template to one's own specifics. The APDB process of parsing the EPS template-formats took the longest times to effect.

Visiting the Adobe site, via APDB, I got an updated EPS parsing file. In addition, the site at www.adobe.com had a wealth of excellent, free, downloadable, information on scanning and graphics.

Although Adobe PhotoDeluxe - Business Edition seems aimed at business uses, its outputs also relate to many personal needs. Thus, it can be used merely to enhance graphics for digital purposes. But on top of that, its templates can be used to create many home needs: calendars, personal cards letterheads and envelopes, labels, invitations, T-shirt transfers, and others. It will just take some practice to create these easily.