I spent Friday night testing out a piece of software called Crazy Talk 5 and I’d love to be able to say it was tough but it wasn’t it was actually a few hours of great fun.

If you haven’t used or heard about CrazyTalk5 before it’s a great piece of software that effectively lets you turn photo into puppets.

Now when I first got hold of this software I wasn’t convinced it was going to be that good as it has a price tag of only £24.99.

I’m happy to say I was completely and utterly wrong.

This software is easy to use and allows you to create some amazing and quite scary (in a good way) animations - I soon had a photo of the other half talking and telling me that I was always right.

If you want to add your own speech then there are two ways to do this - you can either use the text to speech method which allows you to type in what you want the animation to say or record it yourself via a sound recorder button. Both of these methods were easy to use and produced some great results.

What I really like about this software is it allows you to add video to your websites whilst also maintaining some anonymity. This can be achieved because on top of animating photos you can also use the same effects on images and illustrations as well as customise character styles that come with the program.

I know I’ve said it already but the amount of editing and control you have over the speech and puppeteering really is incredible for the amount of money it costs. The great thing about the price tag is that it makes it accessible to so many people. It is a piece of software that could be used by small busineeses on their websites to create amazing animations to guide people round their sites but at the same time be used by a teenager on their home computer to create some fun animations to share with family and friends.

Are there any negatives to it?

Well if you’re looking for a top level piece of animation software then I’d sure you’ll be found wanting in certain areas concerning detail but at £24.99 I was impressed. It’s the perfect piece of software to get you started in animation and will produce some very amusing videos for you to share with your family and, if you like, the whole wide web.

The only one problem I came across was I couldn’t get it to run off my new Vista computer. It is however compatible with Vista and having a browse of the internet I discovered many people were using it with no problems so I would pretty sure this was more of an issue with settings on my computer than the software itself which worked fine on a laptop.

Update: Got it all working on my Vista PC after some very helpful advice from Reallusion Support

Fancy a copy for yourself? You can buy direct from the makers Reallusion or from Amazon.

Popularity: 17% [?]

If you take a photo these days it’s more than likely going to be on a digital camera.
This is great because it allows instant reviews of what you’ve taken but does pose the problem of what you do with all your photos.

What most of us do is bung them all on our computers which solves the problem of clearing the camera but leaves us with another problem.

A rapidly decreasing hard drive on our computers as these photos take up more and more space.
Then there’s the problem of when you want to send someone a photo. If it actually sends it takes forever and then there’s the possibility their email may not be powerful enough to download it the opposite end…

It’s all a bit depressing isn’t it!

Well there is some light on the horizon and it’s in form of a piece of software called Blubox that I’ve been testing.

This program may not be the most exciting piece of software you ever use but is incredibly useful as it compresses all your photos down to a few hundred kilobytes without losing any of the details.
Is it easy to use? Incredibly so. There’s lots of help available through the program but you don’t really need it as it’s been designed to be very simple to get the hang of.

You can compress file into one of two formats – a .zip flue or a .blu file. The former is one that most people will recognise but the latter is one specific to the program. This, as you may have guessed, means you can only send this format to someone who has a BluBox program to open it with.
Now this does sound like a bit of a blow but BluBox has this covered as they provide a free BluBox Viewer which people can download from their website to open the files which is a small compromise to make if it means they’ll actually get the photograph!

I found compressing the files easy and I like how you can still browse through the images once zipped which is something a lot of other programs don’t allow.

BluBox also lived up to its claims of maintaining the quality of the images as I compressed one of my photos to a ridiculously small size and saw no difference in quality once it was unzipped.

This is a great piece of software that any keen photographer should have purchased and installed on their computer asap especially as it’s only £19.99 direct from BluBox or £16.99 at Amazon.

Popularity: 45% [?]