On the Internet many of the latest products come with a valuable addition that is something you could easily do. You get a picture of the product even before you download it.

And when you do download the product often you'll see a thumbnail picture of the product even though it's just a bunch of pages on your screen or from your printer.

If you've looked into having one of these nice looking pictures done for one of your products you'll find that artists charge anywhere from $75 to $125 (and even more) for each picture.

If you've created several products for the Internet you'll soon find that the cost of having a good-looking picture of your products can really add up.

That is until recently.

Today you can get a software product that creates pictures of your products quickly and easily. In fact, you could have a professional looking book picture done in less than 5 minutes. You can get more information about this software at http://frontiergold.com/data/covers but let me tell you more about using it.

I recently got a copy of this software and found that it really is easy to use. The software is from the same fellow who created the software for the Popup software that I talked about a short time ago.

The beauty is that you can create book covers as well as two-dimensional and three-dimensional boxes with this software using the templates that come with it or make your own templates.

I was able to create this simple picture that you see below in less than 5 minutes and then I was able to change the size to whatever I wanted.

You can resize right in the program but I've found I'd rather keep the original size and save the file that way.

Then I open the file in one of my drawing programs, resize it, and then save it as a new file.

The drawing program I use the most is Compact Draw at http://www.mediachance.com but you can use any one that you are familiar, like Paint Shop Pro. I have Paint Shop Pro but haven't used it enough to be able to create objects quickly.

Below you can see my original book cover I created with the software.

I then took that picture in Compact Draw and resized it to look like the one below. I made the picture smaller and also made the book a bit narrower. This image is really great for showing on the Internet.

Since most drawing programs are not concerned with making the file sizes small, I also use Ulead WebRazor's SmartSaver Pro to shrink the size of the file. In this case the original file size was 29.8 KB and the image you see above is only 8.3 KB.

This simple program is great for shrinking image files down. And that really helps when you're working on the Internet since the bigger files take longer to load.

You can get more information on SmartSaver Pro at http://www.ulead.com