Product Description

Design professional-looking media at home with Photo Clip Art by Hemera. Choose real photos from this digital archive for work, school or recreational projects.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7894 in Software
• Brand: Hemera Technologies
• Model: PCA150-ENG-WIN
• Released on: 2004-02-09
• Platforms: Windows 2000, Windows NT, Linux, Unix, Windows 95, Windows 98
• Format: CD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1

Features

• Pentium Processor (233MHZ), 64MB RAM, Windows 95/98/Me or Windows NT 4.0/2000/XP
• 100MB hard disk space, CD-ROM drive
• For PC

Customer Reviews

Best value Hemera offers, but a few cautions
First, if you're thinking about using these photos for print, you may wish to think again. Most objects run between 300-600 pixels in width or height, or 1-2 inches at 300 DPI. Stretch them bigger than that, and they'll start to blur and/or get jagged.

Also note, that if you try to export/save an image from the Hemera Image browser and select the 300 DPI setting, the browser may stretch the graphic larger than it's actual size, causing blurring and jaggedness right out of the gate.

You need to use the "Use Image's Full Size" checkbox when exporting images. If you specify a 300 DPI size, and don't use that checkbox, you'll get a stretched image.

For example, the first image in the collection (the pocket watch) is only 384 pixels wide. If you specify 300 DPI and don't check the "Use Image's Full Size" box, the software will stretch it to 642 pixels wide. The stretching will cause the image to look fuzzier and/or more jagged when you use it in a web site or print project.

All that said, if you're going to use the images for the web, they're great.

You get almost all the images you'd find in their three "Photo Objects" collections, each of which is much more expensive than this single collection. The difference is the Photo Objects collections offer about 20-30% higher resolution (i.e. the first image in the collection is 384 pixels wide, but is 492 pixels wide in Photo Objects) and you can save the Photo Objects images with transparent backgrounds (while this collection forces you to specify a color for the background).

For the price, this is a good collection. There are lots of shots with minor variations, so it may seem like duplication, but for someone trying to get something just right, that slightly different tilt of the head may be just what the doctor ordered.

Can't use this program
This product offers much to chose from and I really liked the photos. However, I have yet to get this program to work right. I am able to view the photos but when I go into the the Export Wizard to save the photos, the photo has a transparency over the top of it, instead of in the background. I tried bypassing the Export Wizard by right clicking on the selected photo and saving. This also inserts the transparency over the photo. I called Hemera in Canada and they instructed me to call Encore USA in CA for support. Encore USA said they couldn't help me. Encore's technical support is "limited to crashes, error messages and lockups". I also referred to their website hoping to find help in the knowledge base or FAQ's. There was VERY little about this software and no help to be found. I wasted my money on a product I can't use and that offers no support for issues out of my control.

Most images are utterly USELESS!
In an effort to boost their file numbers and appear to be more comprehensive, the creators included many VERY low resolution images that they "artsied" or "roughed" up with a dirty polaroid-transfer effect, or split up into 5 small stagger-stacked slides, which they must have hoped would excuse the poor quality of the original image.

For example, if you do a search for "tiger", you will get 165 results, but only 86 will be of the animal, (and not one of 20 images of 10 toy tigers, or 5 images of one tiger-striped chair-cushion and so on), and of those 86, 80 have the crusty effect applied to them. The other 6 tigers have been taken out of those same 80 images and clipped out of their background to give you a floating tiger on a clump of grass or a tiger head (but have, thankfully, not been "dirtied" up with the transfer effect). Out of all, there is NOT ONE clean image of a tiger in its environment.

Here is another example. A search for "sunset" yields 247 results. Of these, 163 have the crusty polaroid transfer effect applied, and 70 are the same images duplicated (much smaller) in a sloppy stack of 5 slides. There are TWO clean sunset images.

These are typical results. Numbers don't mean anything! This product is stuffed with multiple images of toys, frankly not-so-attractive people from hard angles, and old low-resolution stock photos to achieve 150,000 files. Would it have killed them to include ONE clean, print-resolution image in each category? Perhaps we could have done without 50 of the fake slide images (talk about dated anyway!) in order to get a product worth having around.