Product Reviews

The biggest challenge for any low-cost photo-editing program is striking the right balance between powerful editing features and ease of use. That's clearly something Ulead has been concentrating on with this upgrade to its PhotoImpact software, as the list of new features can quite clearly be divided into two sections.

In the powerful category there are additions such as the new Object Extractor, which simplifies the task of selecting objects with a complex or finely detailed outline. When you select this command your photo is displayed in a new window that allows you to trace quickly around the outline of any object in the photo. Once that's done the program automatically homes in on the edges of that object in order to separate it from its background. This feature works surprisingly well and will definitely save a lot of time if you need to create montages or composite images containing elements from multiple photos.

Other additions include the ability to import images in the RAW file format (using the bundled Photo Explorer utility) and edit 16-bit images. There's also a new SmartCurves option that can automatically adjust the tonal curves that describe the distribution of

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light and dark pixels within an image. This is really high-end stuff that can baffle even professional Photoshop users, so Ulead is certainly providing value for money by including such features in a program that sells for under £50.

At this price Ulead clearly hopes to attract home users and hobbyists who may not have much experience of photo-editing work. This upgrade also caters for those users, but with slightly more mixed results. One of the biggest changes in this upgrade is the ability to choose from a number of different workspace layouts that provide different sets of tools. There's a basic workspace for beginners and an advanced workspace that provides access to the more powerful editing tools such as the Object Extractor. You can also select two other workspaces designed for web graphics and general graphics and design work.

This is a good idea, but the problem with the basic photo-editing workspace is that, rather than providing additional help to explain how the tools work, Ulead simply hides a lot of the tools instead. There are some useful automatic options such as the ExpressFix command, which can automatically adjust a whole range of colour, brightness and focus settings all at once. However, if you want to have a bit of fun with the program's special effects, you really need to switch to the advanced mode to see what's on offer. We'd also like to see some sort of context-sensitive help to provide information about the various tools, rather than just leaving you to delve through the rather dense online help files.

PhotoImpact is certainly good value. However, Ulead needs to think a little more carefully about the help it gives to newcomers if it really wants to stand out from the many low-cost photo editors that are currently available.