Microsoft Publisher 2013 is a desktop publisher included with Microsoft Office 2013. The program is designed for novice users, allowing easy access to a large amount of editing tools. You’ll be able to design publications such as cards, magazines, menus, and posters. This free trial version will require you to stay logged into your Microsoft account.

Features

The canvas is where you can upload multiple pictures and arrange them by dragging them. New in this update you can now easily swap in pictures by dragging the new one over the old one and releasing the mouse.

This action uses clearly visible icons and a pink highlight, making it easy to avoid accidental swaps. Another handy new feature is the Apply to Background command. By right clicking on a picture you can Fill or Tile a single image to the entire canvas.

Compared to the 2010 version, the program is better integrated with the rest of Office. The program even includes tools, panes, and formatting found in Word and PowerPoint. The most useful tool taken from the rest of Office 2013 is the ability to pull images from multiple sites such as Flickr or Facebook.

You can even search through these sites, local images, and Office.com’s clip art within a single dialogue box. The clip art available is already plentiful and having an extra tool to locate more images across the web makes it even faster to find the right image. The only draw back is that you cannot access new online images if you become disconnected.

Usability

The interface is streamlined and very easy to understand. The majority of commands are controlled with the tool bar, corresponding hotkeys, or editing menus brought up by right clicking. The biggest design improvement is the addition of the right hand column Scratch Area which contains all of your images.

Unlike the 2010 version, images will no longer simply be dumped on the canvas. Instead you can easily drag and drop images between the scratch and canvas, allowing you better control of your final publication.

Quality

The layout is clean and avoids any unused space or clutter. The program generally functions quickly, even when you add in many large and detailed images. You can still edit clip art from Office.com and other sites that you have already downloaded even if you become disconnected from the web. When you are connected your work will automatically be saved to cloud storage.

Conclusion

Microsoft Publisher 2013 is a powerful tool to construct various printings and publications. The ability to quickly gather images from Office.com and other image sites will make it easier to find just the right image. The new Scratch Area is a welcome addition to help organize all of these pictures. This trial will give you a taste of Microsoft Publisher 2013’s great upgrades.

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The program's interface is divided into three tabs (one for each kind of poster) and includes all the tools you need to customize them. Simply add a picture, type in any text you want, tweak a few settings and you're pretty much done. Unfortunately, there were things I couldn't customize, such as font size. Also, even though there's a tool to move the picture around and make it fit better, it's very limited and sometimes the picture needs to be cropped with a third-party app.

Once finished, the poster can be saved as an image file or conveniently printed as a poster with the built-in printing tool, which enables you to optimize poster printing and make them easier to assemble.

Turn your photos into original posters very easily and in just a few minutes.

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This open-source tool splits up any image into several sheets of paper, enabling you to print them out and then build a poster as large as you want it to be. Just bear in mind that you should use high definition photos, because otherwise you'll get a nice pixelated design instead of a huge attractive poster to pin up on your bedroom's walls. The good thing is that Posterazor supports a really wide variety of image formats.

Posterazor works as a wizard, guiding you through five simple steps in order to create your poster. Though this is probably the easiest way to go for novice users, I missed having a somewhat more advanced interface with other extra options such as frames and borders, some guiding lines to cut out the image or the possibility to add a text layer or even apply a watermark, like in Posteriza (why do they all have similar names?).

The final poster is created in PDF format, so you'll need a PDF reader in order to open the file and print it. I personally recommend Foxit Reader but any other will do the trick. And I must say the results were gorgeous!

Despite lacking some advanced features, its ease of use and support for a wide array of image formats make of Posterazor a great tool for printing large posters.

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Featuring only the bare necessities, IDPhotoStudio, will handle the job in seconds, allowing you to drag and drop your picture onto the interface. You can then select between three ID Photo sizes: US, Canada or France. Because you often need a certain number of photos printed out, IDPhotoStudio has a little drag meter to let you select how many photos you’ll need, from 1 to 15. Click on the print button to get the paper copies of your photo.

IDPhotoStudio is an original idea, and it’s good to see someone come up with a program to quickly print out ID photos. However, the application left us disappointed for a number of reasons. First of all, it doesn’t respect the aspect ratio of photos, so if you drag a large image there’s a risk it’ll appear distorted. Also, when it comes to editing functions, IDPhotoStudio only includes the option to apply sepia or monochrome color filters. We would have preferred if it included tools like a red-eye remover, cropping or contrasting, which are much more useful for improving the quality of pictures. IDPhotoStudio doesn't even include an undo feature, meaning that if you accidentally set your image to greyscale when you'd prefer it in color, you'll need to start over.

If you have a good mug shot of yourself and want to quickly print out a set of passport sized photos, IDPhotoStudio will probably suit you. However, the lack of advanced editing features means you’ll never really be guaranteed with a high quality image of yourself.

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EZ Photo Creations lets you create customized calendars, posters, cards and books with your digital pictures in a really easy way, and then order a printed copy online from your own computer. No designer skills or technical knowledge required, I promise!

The only drawback to EZ Photo Creations is the program's interface and its poor design. It's confusing and a bit uncomfortable, but once you get the knack of it you'll realize the program has a lot of great features that make up for a user-hostile design.

When you launch EZ Photo Creations, you get to choose the project you want to work on: calendar, poster, card or photo book. Each one of these opens up in a different window, and offers similar features and options: support for dragging and dropping images, dozens of background themes to choose from, the optionto customize any text that appears on the screen, and more. EZ Photo Creations also includes a few basic image editing tools and effects (sepia, black and white, emboss, invert, etc.) with which you can add a special touch to your photos.

Once your project is done, you can order as many printed copies as you want from within EZ Photo Creations. Projects will be saved in the program, but they can't be exported to any format.

EZ Photo Creations is a great tool to create custom calendars, cards, posters and photo books. It doesn't require high skills and includes a ton of options, but is only intended to order printed copies online.

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IDPhotoStudio Portable features only basic tools, but it’s more than enough to get the job ready in seconds. You can open the photo by clicking the Upload Picture button, or just drag and drop it onto the program’s interface. IDPhotoStudio Portable lets you select among a bunch of official ID photo sizes, and choose how many of them you’ll need to print out.

That said, the truth is that IDPhotoStudio Portable is far from being perfect. First of all, it doesn’t respect the picture’s aspect ratio, so if you’re using a large image there’s a risk it’ll appear distorted. Also, you can’t resize large images – or edit them in any other way, like cropping or removing a red-eye effect – because the program lacks editing functions. The only thing you’ll find in IDPhotoStudio Portable to edit your images are a couple of filters: monochrome and sepia.

In short, if you need a quick mug shot of yourself, IDPhotoStudio Portable can do the job for you. But if you want a high-quality self-portrait you’ll probably need to look somewhere else.

IDPhotoStudio Portable is a standalone app with which you can create and print passport photos at home.

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This incredibly easy app helps you create personalized calendars, CD covers, albums, brochures, posters and all sorts of photo compositions with your own images in just a few steps. Fotoslate has a zero learning curve; all you need to do is select the templates, choose the photos and you're done.

FotoSlate includes everything you need to complete your project – though some categories have way more templates than others. The program also features a built-in photo editor for quick fixes, and a tool to edit object properties with a few options. Both tools are quite basic, but efficient and easy to use.

Once your photo composition is done, Fotoslate allows you to print it on paper, save it as an image (BMP, JPG or TIFF) or even save it as a PDF document.

Despite being a bit too simple in some aspects, FotoSlate 4 Photo Print Studio is a great tool to create custom photo compositions in a very easy way.

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PrintStation makes this task pretty easy. You can print multiple pictures on multiple pages, with custom page layouts, along with headers and footer text. Most of this doesn't require much more than a few clicks. You can print pictures in columns and rows, resize or multiply single pictures as well as automatically size and position them to fit within your selected print settings.

The template is a clear and easy WYSIWYG preview of all the pages of images you have chosen to print so you can see exactly what you will get. You can also optionally choose to show the filename, file date, file time and other information above or under each image. Most importantly, it supports a huge range of formats including JPEG, TIFF, PCX, DCX, BMP, DIB, PIC, PNG and GIF - very important when you are gathering together photos from various sources.

This is a great idea for those that want to save paper and time although it doesn't allow you to edit your images much so you'll need a third party app for that.

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