Well, here I am on vacation at beautiful Indian Rocks Beach, Florida, looking out the window of our condo at an outbreak of red tide… so what better time to take a few minutes from my vacation and tell you about my latest find on the Internet, just free for the download.

Although I am a native Floridian and wouldn’t trade our fine state for any other state in the Union, I am not much of a beach-sitting, sun-worshiper. While my wife bakes to a golden-brown medium-rare, I usually bring along my notebook and a couple of programs to test out on the trusty old notebook. I do love to walk along the beach at sunset as the Gulf of Mexico swallows up that big orange ball and click away with my digital camera. A few years back one of the photos actually ended up on the front of our Christmas card. I know that may sound a little strange but if you received one of the cards you’ll understand; if not, I took one of the more beautiful sunset shots, and using Jasc’s Paint Shop Pro, added a string of colorful beads around the sunset scene, and that became the cover of our Christmas card for that year.

Using that as a segue, just before leaving on vacation this year, I visited http://www.jasc.com to see what, if anything, was new since my last visit and found their latest offering in the view-download-organize-manipulate your digital images world called After Shot™ Premium Edition. I figured if it was half as good as Paint Shop Pro has always been, then it would be worth my time to look at it.

System requirements are pretty standard: A Windows-based system using Windows 98 or higher, 64MB of RAM, 60MB of free hard disk space, CDROM drive, etc. Also needed for certain features of the program are QuickTime, Internet Explorer and Adobe Acrobat Reader. They also suggest that your video display be set to True Color (24-bit) so you can view digital images with photographic image quality.

Installation was straightforward as any other Windows-based program except that After Shot “investigates” your system configuration and automatically makes recommendations for installation of additional software, if needed, like the programs mentioned in the previous paragraph.

I suggest the first thing you do is run the After Shot Tour to familiarize yourself with all the features and also check out the tutorials included. When After Shot is started, it opens on the Browse Tab that looks very similar to Windows Explorer with the folders, or directory tree, on the left side and thumbnail views of images on the right. On the left side are four tabs, Browse, Info, Keywords and Search. From the Browse tab you can create new albums or open existing ones by browsing to the location where the images are stored. While viewing an album you can sort the images in any number of ways, such as name, date, size and type. You can also rename a single image or a batch of images. Double-clicking on any thumbnail opens the image and switches to the Info tab, which gives you image information and camera settings (EXIF data). Although not required, the Info tab allows you to enter image specific titles and descriptions, which can be useful when used by other features of After Shot, like Slide Show and Print and Web Layout tools.

If you take the time to enter information about your images using the Info and Keyword tabs, it sure makes it a lot easier to find what you may be looking for when you click on the Search tab. You can set search criteria such as Image Title, Image Description, Album Title, Album Description, Filename and Album Name.

Jasc divides After Shot into five groups of tools:

Organizational tools - which I discussed above

Acquisition tools - twain, digital camera and card reader support

Photo Editing tools - crop, Quick-Fix (adjust colors, contrast and brightness automatically), batch process (Quick-Fix: rotate, rename and resize all your pictures with one click of the mouse), individual image adjustment (adjust the contrast/brightness, color, hue/saturation, sharpness and equalization of your pictures one at a time) and quick red-eye removal.

Sharing tools - on-line print services (Shutterfly.com), print templates (over 40 easy-to-use print templates, including standard photo sizes like 4x6, 8x10, etc.), Web (create web photo albums and you can upload your pages to the Web right from After Shot), Movies (instantly turn a series of pictures into a movie that you can save in .MOV format to share with family, friends or business associates. Requires QuickTime to play and view. You can also load, play and add effects to AVI or QuickTime movies.) and computer screensavers and wallpaper (use your own digital photos for your computer wallpaper or as a screensaver).

Cool tools - slide shows (create slide shows using individually selected photos or entire albums), panoramic views (create panoramas by stitching several photos together), text and sound (add a soundtrack or captions to your photos, narrate photos, record greetings or write your own captions with After Shot's annotation features).