Product Reviews

It's hard to believe that there could be anyone out there who doesn't have some kind of photo-editing program installed on their computer. Yet there's no end to the stream of new photo-editing packages trying to muscle in on this highly competitive market. The Home Photo Wizard from Magix stands out from the crowd, though, because it is so inexpensive. At just £27 it's half the price of its main rivals, including Adobe's Photoshop Elements and Serif's PhotoPlus (reviewed on page 54).

The package has three components. The Home Photo Wizard is a file management

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program that helps you organise your digital photo collection. Its options include the ability to categorise and search for photos and to burn photo albums to CD or DVD. Photo Clinic is an image-editing program with a commendable array of tools for tidying up your photos, along with a decent selection of artistic effects and special effects filters. Finally, there's the Music Manager program, a passable music player that seems to have been thrown in for good measure.

The Photo Wizard and Photo Clinic programs work well and include a decent range of features for the money. However, both suffer from ungainly interfaces. Photo Clinic in particular has a habit of throwing confusing dialog boxes on to the screen without explaining how they work. Jargon such as 'orbitals' and 'radius variance' won't mean much to beginners, and the skimpy printed manual does little to introduce new users to the techniques of photo editing.

Although the Home Photo Wizard is undoubtedly good value at £27 including VAT, its inelegant interface and poor documentation mean it's unlikely to offer much of a challenge to its well-established competitors.