I stole that line; it was too good to pass up. Thanks, Helen….

© 11-10-06 Dr. Michael N. Roach

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A Lot of Images… A Lot of Back-Up Storage

As a photographer married to another photographer, one of our (many) daily problems is the storing of image files. First, there is the working file on the computer, then there is the stored file on the back-up hard drive, and then there are two CD's or DVD's as copies. One copy will be retained on site, and one copy will to go to the bank safe-deposit box for storage. Often there is one more disk as well; the client gets their copy of the file or files.

Internally, our own stored disks usually aren't very pretty. They simply have file name and date scrawled with a marker on the disk. The disk for the client, however, needs a little more care and presentation in order to maintain a certain professional image. Designing a separate file label per client doesn't seem feasible and designing some more or less generic client file labels seems to be a job reserved for rainy days—and it doesn't seem to rain often enough to get them done.

Enter Disc Cover, an application produced by BeLightSoft.com. This application is small, neat, easy and only needs 50 MB or hard drive space for the basic application. It will need 1.8 GB if you want all 23,000+ images to be readily available on your hard drive. To tell you about Disc Cover is to sound a bit like the blurbs on the box itself.

What do you want to design? You are not in the least restricted to disk covers; all the inside components are available as pre-defined windows right from the beginning.

To start with, labels from all the popular manufacturers are supported. My rough count, of label sizes and printers that print labels directly on the disk itself, totaled up to 325. Choices included Avery, Canon, Epson, Neato, Memorex and more—many of which I have never heard of or previously encountered. All have pre-made templates, and either I am luckier than usual or Disc Cover has done some careful work because I printed on three different printers on several brands of labels and never had to adjust/calibrate the image more than two or three millimeters each time. Only in precise disk designs did I have to adjust the image on the calibration page at all; casual designs printed looking good right off the original template. The following is the selection window where you can see a sampling of the templates available for selection.

What size hole do you want in the center of your selected disk? Just choose.

The calibration feature is wonderful.

How many times have you held a printed test sheet and a label sheet up against a light box (or more likely a window) and tried to determine how far up and over to move your design trying to make it match up with the sheet of labels? The calibration function makes it easy to determine how close the template design is to the die cuts on the label. As I previously mentioned, one of my three small format printers was dead on and the other two only required a couple of millimeters of adjustment.

OK, what else is in the Disc Cover application? More than 70 disk designs are there to choose from. You can integrate iPhoto, iTunes, and iDVD material. You can tint, tile, control transparency, rotate, and apply masks and shadows to images. Text can be applied in circle mode. It can be lined up, and character and paragraph spacing are controllable. Data can be imported from the Finder, from music CD's and tab-delimited text files. We'll see that set of window choices a bit later.

Disc Cover can export results to JPEG, PDF, and TIFF and it runs natively on both Power PC and Intel Macintosh computers.

So, rather than continue to sound like the outside of the box, let's look at some of the steps involved and some of the choices that can be made. I say “some of” because I can show you only a sampling of the possibilities. There's no manual in the box, and you shouldn't really need one. If you really desire guidance beforehand, a well arranged HELP function will spell it all out for you. For me, the discovery was half the fun, and this has been the first time I have enjoyed making disk labels. The success of the results is in the eye of the viewer. For me, this has been the easiest disk label designing application that I have encountered.

On my first introduction to the toolbar it had such a normal, Mac-like quality that I was immediately at home.

As you can see, all the tools are instantly recognizable, and self-explanatory. Inspector, color choices, fonts, printing, selecting images, enlarging and reducing and drawing of geometric shapes, text blocks, and curved printing—all were happily Mac-like. But I began by ignoring all the pre-designed geometric shapes, layouts, and clip art because I wanted to see how working on my own might look. Many designs are already provided, but this application makes it easy to do your own.

One of the real joys I discovered in Disc Cover is the ease with which a custom-made design can be stored as a template that can still be modified. One of the first quick designs that I produced for myself was a cover for a back-up disk. I wanted it to simply say Back-up with the month, year and the numbers 1 through 14. The idea was to circle the number of the disk in sequence since I have never had to make more than fourteen back-up DVD's in single month. The imported image was a garden scene sitting on my computer desktop.

Even stored as a template, Disc Cover's design is still editable. All I have to do is double-click on the text and a window appears with the text. Now I select what I want to change and retype the current month in this example. The application re-centers the type and allows me to progress. The year works the same way. If you reuse the same template, the calibration function need only be done once for your printer. More on the calibration in a moment.

Using virtually the same template but changing only a few words and the image, we now have a client disk. Adding a white space allows the client name to be written in or keystroked in place if maintaining the finished look of the whole disk warrants it. Removing the line of numbers is a single select and delete if they are not needed. Since the template can be stored as both a background image and a foreground image, all of the image can be moved to the background, thus leaving the white space as the area to select to type into. Done this way there is no chance of disturbing the layout of the background of the disk. Yet, you can select the background at any time and still edit it.

What could I have used as part of my disk design? Let's look. Geometric designs are available, fully vector so they can be resized with no effort.

Here is a fraction of the 23,000 clip art images available from the full install.

Here's a quick look at the possibilities of pre-designed disk designs. Fit your own text to the images and simply fit images of your own into the already defined spaces if you like. Good layout and design work has already been done for you; just import your own information and follow the layout for a quick output.

In assembling your disc you may select from (l to r) iMusic; iPhoto; iDVD; data from a folder, and images from the clip art files.

Those geometric shapes can also be accessed from a menu selection.

What can you not do? You can't rotate a Disc Cover design while you are working on it. Also there is no way to pull a continuously visible ruler line across an image to easily line up separate elements on either side of the hole in the center of the disc. Outside of those two items, I couldn't find another thing I wanted. Like we have come to expect of the best Macintosh software, “It Just Works” and quite elegantly as well!

Disc Cover is available from BeLight Software, www.BeLightSoft.com, for $39.95 + shipping and handling. The download edition is $34.95 but contains fewer templates and only about 900 pieces of clip art as compared to 23,000 in the boxed edition. Crossgrade options are also available. BeLight also produces Business Card Composer, Swift Publisher and Mail Factory. Academic, Non-Profit, Government and bundle pricing are also available.

BeLight Software is located at BeLight Software, 6893 Sullivan Road, Grawn, MI 49637.

You can support Applelust by buying the software just reviewed from this link:

• BeLight Software: Disc Cover

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