Hemera has taken clip art to a new level with their Photo Clip Art package. It’s not your father’s clip art anymore! With this collection clip art has been transformed from cartoonish characters and pencil-drawings to photo-realistic, visually appealing artwork. The 100,000 photos are royalty-free, so you can use them in all your projects. From banners to invitations and newsletters to business cards, these photos can spice up just about any creative endeavor whether web or paper based.
The photos of real people, animals and objects are just as uncomplicated to use as traditional clip art. The images come with an easy-to-use search engine. Type in a keyword and thumbnail pictures of all related images will appear. Or choose a category like science & technology, sports, business, or animals, and browse through the pictures in that category. To select any image, just click it. You can simply drag and drop the image into your project, or can follow a series of stepped choices. First you choose the way you will use the image; in a word processing program, a slide presentation, on the web, or as an exported image. The choices that follow are customized to the type of output that you just selected. Since each image is pre-masked, you can choose the color of the background or can even insert your own background image. You can also easily resize, crop and/or flip the image. You even get to choose the file format and make adjustments to the file size and image quality. Amazingly, Hemera has made this entire process very easy.
The variety of images in this package is outstanding. Everyday object were especially well represented, with everything from ice cream dishes to scales to dining tables. In the food category there were the usual individual pictures of strawberries, apples and hamburgers. But choices also included baskets of food, bushels of food, plates of food, candy, pies, fondue, and a plethora of other food related photos. Other categories such as health, home, holiday, and education were also well represented with useful images. You can also create your own collection of personal favorites by dragging the images of your choice by creating a folder and dragging and dropping photos into it.
These Hemera photos are compatible with almost all popular art, presentation, and word processing programs, including PhotoDeluxe, Photoshop, Illustrator, American Greetings, The Print Shop, PrintMaster, WordPerfect, Word, PhotoSuite, Picture It, Print Artist, Photoimpact, and many, many more. In fact, I did not find a program that they did not work with. On top of that, they printed beautifully on every printer that I tried. The Photo Clip Art package works with all the current versions of Windows, and a Mac version is also available.
What’s not to like? It seems that Hemera offers a three month trial subscription to some of their on-line clip art with this program, but the offer was not explained well enough to make you sure that it is free (It is!). Also, although thumbnails of all the art work can be seen on the main screen, when you want to see a larger photo, you often have to insert one of the seven image disks. I would like to see the images also available on DVD so I would not have to switch disks so often.
If you are looking for eye-catching photos or want to add visual impact to any project, check out this clip art collection. With a 30-day money back guarantee, you can’t go wrong.
