Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Graphics-Toolbox


As a 2nd year member of the TOS Homeschool Crew, I have been given the wonderful opportunity to review many homeschool products over the next several months. The only compensation that I receive for my review is the free product. I feel truly blessed to be participating in this review group and I'm looking forward to trying out more products and giving you my honest opinion.

Graphics-Toolbox is a graphic designing software that was created by a team of software designers to be used by the average computer owner.

I'm guessing that many of you might think that you have no need for a graphic designing software, but I would argue with you that you are quite wrong. Some of the things you could create using Graphics-Toolbox are:

custom blog headers and banners
custom Christmas cards and invitations
Scrapbook pages
business/ 'for sale' signs and fliers
project displays for homeschool
custom worksheets
and more

Also Graphics-Toolbox has wonderful photo editing capabilities. I learned how to edit and restore my photos a couple of years ago and I am so glad that I did. I've restored family photos that were almost 80 years old and nearly destroyed.

Here's an example... (Please note: I restored this photo before I had Graphics-Toolbox, so this was done with a different program. I'm only showing you this example to emphasize the importance of having a good photo-editing software. Graphics-Toolbox does have the necessary capabilities to restore a photo like this.)


This is a family photo taken in about 1920. It was being stored in a 'magnetic' album and the sticky residue that attaches the photos to the album was eating a hole right through the picture. It was torn in several places, was yellowed and brittle, and someone had written all over it blue ink! It was also our only copy of the picture.


As you can see, I was able to save this picture (and the memory and legacy that went along with it) using a photo editing software.

Thankfully, Graphics-Toolbox offers many free video tutorials to walk you through using their program. You can view them here, which will also give you a good idea of all the fun things you can do with their program.

I have to say, that even though the tutorials were very helpful, they were also a tad bit lengthy and I still felt like this program was hard to use after viewing them. I try not to compare products too much, but I found myself lacking motivation to use this software. This is because I already own software that can do all that Graphics-Toolbox can do and I feel that the software I own, is much more user-friendly. To be fair, though, the software that I own is actually two programs: a photo-editing software and a digital scrapbooking software. Nevertheless, they are easier to use, compatible with one another, and the two programs together are actually less expensive than Graphics-Toolbox.

Graphics-Toolbox can be purchased for $149. Their site is full of information about their product and I encourage you to check it out as well as all the other reviews at the TOS Crew Blog.

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