A few months ago I was doing some training and one of the users told me about FotoFusion. That evening I looked at the Web site and was intrigued by the product. I told myself that once I got some of that elusive free time, I’d download the trial and give it a longer look. Before I had the chance to do that, I saw the product in action at a trade show and was truly amazed by some of the things that it did.

Some of you might ask if it is another image editor or a layout product or exactly where it fits in the design process. The best way I can describe it is that it incorporates some of the best features from a variety of product types and does something that I’ve not seen done by any other product.

Typically you’ll work with a template that defines how you want images laid out on a page. This could be one of the many supplied templates or it could be one that you’ve created. On that template will be places where photos can be placed. FotoFusion can fill those spots automatically from a group of photos you choose or you can drop the photos into position yourself. All pictures incorporated into the layout will be kept at their full resolution while you are working. Now if you had a page with at least 100 photos, you might think it would be slow. If so, you’d be dead wrong. This program is blindingly fast! Once you have laid out your page, you can export the whole page to one large bitmap or print it.

To fully understand the program, I highly recommend you watch several of the tutorial movies on the Lumapix Web site. Then download the trial and give it a try. If you need to lay out pages with numerous photos, I think you’ll really like FotoFusion.