Product Reviews

This is the first time Photoshop LE has been sold as a standalone product, but it's actually been around for a while, bundled with various scanners, digital cameras and inkjet printers.

As the name suggests, it's a cut-down version of Photoshop 5, but it shares that program's look and feel - which is no bad thing, since this is one of the crispest and cleanest interfaces around. You can combine and split the tabbed palettes, displaying only those you want and hiding the rest. The palettes 'snap' into alignment when you place them close to each other, too.

But although Photoshop LE is a class act, it feels underpowered compared to its immediate competition. For straightforward image editing, it's certainly very effective, and is often quicker and more logical to use. But what about web graphics? Adobe might think that people interested in web design as well will buy two packages, but

ADVERTISEMENT

with the spectacularly versatile PhotoImpact as a rival, it's a dangerous assumption to make.

Photoshop LE doesn't offer any vector-based drawing tools, either, while many competing products do. Once, drawing programs and image-editors were considered different breeds of software, but both Paint Shop Pro and PhotoImpact demonstrate the potential of combining both in a single program.

On paper, all this counts heavily against Photoshop LE, but when you come to use it, you see things in a different light. It's quite beginner friendly, and there's a lot of potential hidden beneath that unassuming surface. For instance, you can quickly create selections and masks with soft edges and smoothly graduated opacity. Also, the tonal controls are more instantly logical and effective than the competition's. The special effects really are 'special' (not just gimmicky), and the system for managing and combining image layers has often been copied, but never bettered.

Indeed, once you know your way around this program, you'll soon be finding alternative ways to generate the effects that the others achieve 'off the peg'. Still, at the end of the day, there's a definite lack of extras. Quite apart from the absence of drawing tools and web graphic features, it badly needs an equivalent of Paint Shop Pro's Browse feature (or PhotoImpact's Albums) for organising your collections of digital images. So while it's an excellent image-editor, as an all-round graphics tool it loses out.