PhotoImpact | screenshots:
interface,
overlay,
Easy Palette,
ExpressFix,
PhotoExplorer
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Details at a glance
Photo and Image editor
PC: Win 2000, XP+
Mac: None
We clicked with
Bundled PhotoExplorer, Level of customisation allowed, EasyPalette and ExpressFix features
Shots in the dark
Layer Panel, No easy Save For Web feature, Complexity of advanced panels, No Mac support
Links
More Ulead information
www.ulead.com
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These days, if you mention the terms image or photo editing, the name Adobe Photoshop will come up straight away. For a long time and still now, Photoshop has been the product of choice for anyone from amateur photographers to top advertising designers, and as such is considered by many to be the only choice for image editing. This is a big shame, because worthy editors like PhotoImpact can easily be overlooked - and while they may not offer the same range of features, they have one big advantage: Photoshop is around £600, Ulead PhotoImpact is £50.
Value for money
For your money you get an image editor with both photo and professional editing features. You also get the Photo Explorer 8.6 photo manager, Cool 360 panorama creator and Gif Animator 5 is thrown in free. The program can be downloaded or bought in a box, and if you choose the latter you get a bonus CD with over 5000 royalty free images and a video tutorial.
The box set is also the better option because of its user guide. Weighing in at over 300 pages it covers the majority of the program's features, and while the online help shares this information, its always easier to have something physical on your desk to refer to, especially in a program that can get as complex as this.
Different levels of skill
PhotoImpact sells itself as “Professional Image Editing Made Easy” and in practice it's just that, having features for various levels of skill. All the photo editing functions are there like red-eye reduction. A lot of people will find these functions enough - but if you want more advanced features they are all there: Layer masks, Bezier curves and Histogram graphs to name a view.
Thankfully with this much complexity, Ulead have noticed that the last thing a beginner wants it's a cluttered interface with functions they may never use. To solve this, PhotoImpact has five viewing “modes” depending on what you want to do. The modes have different toolbars, menus and panels, and it's really easy to change to another mode or customise your own. There are also seven panels, to hold the layers, effects, histogram and open documents, and a very neat trick can be found when moving these. When you start dragging a panel around, an onscreen overlay appears with arrows to let you dock the panel. It's a visual trick of little importance, but it shows some of the steps Ulead have taken to make the program user friendly.
The modes are quite descriptive and each useful in their own way. Basic Photo Mode has big clear buttons and only the basic options like crop, to make it very easy and uncluttered. Standard Photo Mode brings in more advanced features like white balance correction, curves and the Easy Palette, and options continue to be added all the way up to Advanced mode that has everything.
Photo Editing
As you might expect, the program's main strength is photo editing, and its two big features are the “Easy Palette” system and “ExpressFix”. Easy Palette lives in a panel all of its own and comprises of over 2500 effects, everything from colour changes and distortions to brush effects and animation and then frames. With this many there are obviously some duds (even Photoshop has some) but they are a good time-saving feature - for example just drag and drop to apply increasing amounts of blur. The effects themselves are just a series of recorded actions (like select, fill, delete etc) and because of this you can modify them or even make your own. You could change the dimensions, colour, text and transparency of a border and save it as a custom effect. It's a simple feature but the level of customisation makes them very useful.
ExpressFix is an extension of the Easy Palette effects, wrapping them up in a step-by-step wizard for fixing your photos. It takes you through overall and subject exposure, colour cast, saturation, focus and skin blemish fixes. There are before and after previews with three presets each - but these are very much hit and miss with very little control so I'd recommend you to use the custom adjustments where possible (these mimic the drag and drop effects described above). ExpressFix and a simple crop make a very useful as a quick photo editor and might be ll that you need for lots of pictures. To highlight this Ulead have made both options easily accessible on the Basic Photo mode.
Other than these, there are some other handy image editing features, the descriptively named “Correct Chromatic Aberration” tool can get rid of purple fringing (and other colours too) and although it isn't entirely perfect at removing it, it generally makes a good job of it. For those using SLRs that record colour spaces, the software can recreate them by slightly playing with the levels so that the picture on screen better reflects the picture you saw. The software can use some generic catch-all spaces for each manufacturer, but cannot choose individual cameras. Finally the High Dynamic Range feature can combine two or more similar shots at different exposure levels to get perfectly lit photos. Unfortunately it does require a lot of precise manipulation of contrast, highlights and shadows to get right, and by this time you could achieve the same result with effects or levels.
As an image editor
While it does say it's a professional image editor, you can't get over the feeling that it's a photo editor at heart and these other features have been tacked on - and this is what causes PhotoImpact to be less successful as an image editor. To some extent this is because of the sheer number and complexity of the features that Ulead have packed in. This makes for a rather confusing interface and it may take you a while to get the best out of this.
Layers are a case in point; any designer will know the usefulness of layers and of course PhotoImpact supports. Unfortunately they are quite poorly implemented. The layers panel is very small at its default size (I tested it on a relatively high resolution of on a 1268 x 1024l). It has a total of 17 buttons and fields and while I could easily find the “delete layer” button, I couldn't find the “new layer” button at all! Layer masks are added to each new layer as they are added but it isn't clear how to edit them. My common sense suggests that you should click on the layer mask but instead you need to click on a small button that looks strangely like a skull to select it. Even then it isn't very obvious that it is ready to be edited. You'll need a couple of days' experimentation to get the best out of layers.
Another problem that I found was with another fairly basic function - “save for web”. In a world where everyone seems to have a blog or a Flickr account or wants to upload pictures to the ThinkCamera gallery, saving images for use on the web is a must. Unfortunately Ulead have chosen to hide it away four menus down where it probably won't even be found by most people. You need to enter the Web Mode interface and it only saves JPEGs - no gifs or PNGs. It is possible to save your pictures at an appropriate web quality using the “Save As...” menu but its not as easy, and involves scrolling through a large list of formats with less used files like Amiga IFF. These tend to camouflage the more useful web friendly formats.
Photo Explorer
It's also worth mentioning Photo Explorer, the photo manager that comes free with PhotoImpact. In my opinion this is worth the price of the whole program. It's a manager in the same vein of Adobe Bridge, allowing you to scan through images anywhere on your computer. A double click will take you into PhotoImpact for editing. The two programs are linked so there is no delay while it opens the browser and vice-versa. The software's best feature is that it displays the EXIF data of photos as you look at them. Information such as dimensions, date, focal length and camera. You can even customise the look by choosing more specific EXIF tags from a full list of 70 fields. Perhaps the only flaw is the lack of any rating options, but for quick browsing this program is great, and free!
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PhotoImpact may not have the polish of Photoshop but then it costs about 10% of the price. If you get into the very advanced features then most of the time you will find that PhotoImpact can do what you need but it may not have the easiest interface. It's ironic that the wealth of features in PhotoImpact provide one of its drawbacks - there is just too much for the interface. However, the modes simplify this by hiding features you don't need. If what you need is a basic photo editor then PhotoImpact is a very good piece of software. Easy Palette and ExpressFix make photo editing very easy and at this price it is well worth a look.
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