Review: Sparkbooth Turns a PC Into a Photo booth

December 15, 2012

Looking for a neat party favor? No need to rent a photo booth to capture a few silly photos when you have Sparkbooth installed on your computer. This clever application lets you use a webcam and a computer to capture photo strips, almost as if you were sitting in a real photo booth. And while the software is on the expensive side—$59 for a consumer license—it's a whole lot cheaper than actually renting a photo booth. Sparkbooth is free to try for 10 days, but the demo version places a watermark on all of your photos. To use Sparkbooth, simply install it on your Windows or Mac computer and attach your Webcam. Sparkbooth will find it automatically, and displays a large preview photo on the screen—and this preview is a lot more accurate at showing you what your photo will look like than those old mirrors you find in some photo booths. You hit the space bar to begin, and it then begins snapping four pictures in succession. The application alerts you when it's about to capture the image, and then displays the results in a sequence of images that appear on screen. Sparkbooth can create cute photo strips for your party guests. Sparkbooth includes a few effects that you can add to your photos: color (which is the default), black & white, sepia, and fomomatic (which makes it look like it was shot with a toy camera). You can change these settings via Sparkbooth's menu, which is a little cumbersome, or you can add a keyboard shortcut to change them more easily. Sparkbooth's creator notes that the number of effects is limited because the software is really designed for use with guests who will want to sit for a photo and move on, not mess around with the software. In that respect, he's right: the software really is easy to use for anyone who just wants to sit for their photos and then get back to the party. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2020533/review-sparkbooth-turns-a-pc-into-a-photo-booth.html