ProShow Reviewer's Comments

Quickly and efficiently combine your favorite photos into simple, yet high-quality slideshows with Proshow from Photodex Corporation, our third pick and "TopTenREVIEWS  Bronze Award" winner. Proshow provides an extremely convenient workspace, one of the largest feature sets around, and the kind of high-quality results that you’d expect from a professional.

Although this product is one of the better available, its lack of a manual and step-by-step tutorials, design features, and input/output options kept it from beating the top-rated Polaroid My Memories Suite .

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Ease of Use:  

Proshow is simple and effective software that offers many helpful tools — like drag-and-drop picture placement—that make the slideshow creation process a real snap. As some slideshow software breaks the creation process into different steps, Proshow takes a different approach, giving you access to all of its tools in one convenient location.

Although this software is quite easy to use, its single-screen approach and unique terminology make it slightly harder to learn than other top-rated programs—this is why it received a lower score in this area.

Design Features:  

Proshow offers nearly every feature we were looking for, starting with one of the most impressive transition selections around, including paintbrush, spiral-in, exploding picture, waves and more. This program also offers tons of sample pictures and songs to enrich your slideshow or act as placeholders until you find the music or image you’re looking for.

You can also record your own voice for use in the slideshow, edit your graphics for added flair and with built-in hotkeys, you can make changes to your slideshow at the press of a button. This program, however, does not offer pre-designed templates and doesn’t allow you to add video clips to your slideshow.

As far as sharing with others, Proshow lets you save your slideshow as a screensaver and executable file or burn it to a CD or a DVD. You can also share your creations with family and friends online, by uploading your slideshow to the program’s sharing site.

Photodex also offers a professional-grade version of Proshow called Proshow Producer .

Input/Output:  

Proshow provides for quick and easy publication to CD with additional options for online sharing and for use as a screen saver. 

Proshow doesn't provide for direct importing from scanners, digital cameras and other devices, requiring additional uploading and reformatting.

Slideshow Quality:  

Proshow’s slideshow quality is one of the highest available. There is virtually no image distortion with this program, with pictures appearing as clear and vibrant as they do on the page. Also, added music maintains its compression quality, ensuring excellent results for looped or synced audio soundtracks.

Help/Support:  

Photodex Corporation offers a lot of great help and support for Proshow in the form of FAQs, email support and a telephone support line. But the product’s lack of tutorials and help manuals is its biggest setback. With a step-by-step tutorial, Proshow customers could more quickly learn the terminology used in the product and quicken their overall slideshow creation pace.

Summary:  

With tons of feature options and high-quality sound and picture results, Proshow by Photodex Corporation is some of the best slideshow software in the business. With a slightly more user-friendly format and increased step-by-step instruction, we feel this product could improve its usability significantly. In the meantime, the top-rated Polaroid My Memories Suite is certain to impress.