PhotoImpact 6

by Jim Workman, LACS

To evaluate my review, you need to understand my photo-editing needs. I bought a digital camera to add photos to a 6-year-old, text-only website. Five hundred photos later, I went shopping for software that could do batch-mode enhancements and help me create efficient web graphics. Ulead’s PhotoImpact 6 seemed to fill my bill. I am a graphics neophyte trying to use an intermediate product so take any of my criticisms with a grain of salt. The defects may be in the operator rather than the software.

Image-Editing software falls into three major categories. The first consists of packages aimed at graphics novices that are usually under $50. They are often included with other software or hardware or may feature a rebate near the price of the product. They only include the simplest features that are used most of the time. The second group includes the under-$100 packages aimed at more sophisticated users. Finally there is Photoshop, which costs so much that only professional users actually buy a full-version copy. Photo editing is only a tiny fraction of this professional painting software.

Listing at $100, PhotoImpact 6 promises that it is "The Best Image Editor for the Web." It has the basic photo-editing functions plus bells and whistles to dress up your photos and take them to the Internet. Many of these features I never expect to use and have not bothered to learn. They include 3-D text shaped like the Eiffel Tower, bubbles, fireworks, lightning bolts, rubber stamps, picture frames, and many other special effects.

There is, however, another group of features I hope to use in the future to create more sophisticated Web pages. These include GIF Animation, Interactive Rollovers (an icon changes when the cursor passes over it), and Web page layout templates. But for the moment I just want to add images to my current pages.

Unlike many low-end packages, PhotoImpact comes with a manual of 270 glossy, small-print pages. Some of the images, especially in ‘Special Effects’, are color, but the examples in the basic photo enhancement section are strictly black-and-white. The manual concentrates on how to access each tool without explaining how to use the tool. There are few examples in the manual based on tasks. The black-and-white screen shots show almost no detail and have little in common with the surrounding text.

I found the online help to be somewhat hit or miss (like most online help). Again the help is not task oriented. There are only five tutorials instead of the fifteen or twenty required for a software package this sophisticated. I think this goes back to the fact that this is an intermediate level product. Although Ulead is glad to sell to newbies, they are not into hand-holding.

I looked for a book to supplement the manual and online help. The vast majority of third-party documentation is written for Photoshop. Books about PhotoImpact are comparatively scarce. I found one called "PhotoImpact Solutions" by Jason Dunn, but there are so many features to P.I.6 that only a small portion of the book was devoted to image editing.

There is a ‘Post Processing Wizard’ in P.I.6 which walks you through some of the basic enhancement steps such as straightening, cropping, focus, brightness, and color balance. Straightening and cropping are intuitive, but some of the other tasks offer an array of tiny thumbnails showing different levels of the desired effect. (A thumbnail is a small image of picture usually linked to the original.) These thumbnails are often indistinguishable from one another but can be clicked to show the effect on the original image. This works well to make quick corrections to an entire image.

When you need to select a portion of the picture for special processing, be prepared to spend time even when you have mastered the program. Many of these tools are not very intuitive, and the multiple levels of undo come in very handy.

PhotoImpact has plenty of power for image editing. The hard part is figuring out how to use all the myriad tools. The text, crop, eraser, and zoom tools are pretty straightforward, but when should you use one of the fourteen retouch tools, twelve paint tools, or nine clone tools? It takes time and dedication to learn the nuances of a complex graphics program.

The Easy Palette contains libraries of special effects, clipart, and templates. Categories are arranged in a tree view on the left like Windows Explorer. Thumbnail examples of the individual effects are displayed on the right. You can drag an effect to your photo to turn it into a Post-Impressionist masterpiece or incorporate it into a pre-made Mothers Day card. Within ‘Easy Palette’ is the ‘Layer Manager’ to help you keep track of an image composed of multiple objects.

The Quick Command Panel allows you to record a series of steps for PhotoImpact to perform. This macro can be named and used over and over. It can be used in batch mode on several files or even a whole directory. This is great if all your indoor shots have a greenish cast or you want to put frames on a group of photos.

P.I.6 has a whole array of text effects like you see in greeting card software. Textured fonts, convoluted paths, and animation effects are no problem. All typing is done in a text box, which is applied to the image so this is not quite as WYSIWYG as some products.

There is a separate group of vector drawing tools for creating shapes, curves, and paths. Vector images, similar to those in Corel Draw, are defined by mathematical formulae so they are much more scalable than the more usual bit-mapped images.

I found the stitch mode, for combining two overlapping photos into a panoramic view, to be less than perfect. The auto-align could not pick up a fairly obvious reference point, and the gunsight-cursor made manual alignment imprecise.

I find it easiest to work from an included companion application called ‘PhotoImpact Album’. I can organize groups of photos into albums of thumbnails. The images are displayed like a 35-mm slide album for easy viewing. I can quickly find the thumbnail of the photo that I want to work on, and then drag it to the PhotoImpact icon to open the original in P.I.

Photos do not automatically show up in the album. An album must be created and the pictures must be inserted. Albums are fairly easy to manage when the original images are in a corresponding folder. After images are added or modified in the source folder, there is an option to update only the changes in the album. (This obvious need is not well documented or on the main screen.)

Photos in the album can be annotated with database-style fields. If you don’t want to start from scratch, there are preset album templates based on the tracked information. (Photographer’s Album has fields for camera, lens, aperture setting, etc.)

From ‘Album’ I can select multiple photos which had been shot in vertical format, then from the main toolbar choose Source, Rotate Right to stand them up properly.

A very cool feature is the ‘Export to Web’ function that creates a simple Web page with thumbnails that display the full image when clicked.

Speaking of the Web, that’s why I chose PhotoImpact. The program developers do everything they can to help you create a Web page. There are templates of popular frame configurations. There are libraries of background wallpaper, banners, bullets, buttons, and icons. All graphics can be filtered through the Image Optimizer to make sure that colors and files sizes are Web-friendly. Images can be sliced to display a bit at a time as they are loading into the browser. You can create image maps where clicking on different sections of an image link to different pages. Standard text such as Album annotations converts directly to HTML.

PhotoImpact does not have all the Web-building tools of MS FrontPage, but it can certainly help you get your photos from your desktop to the Internet.

For newbies to the world of photo editing, I recommend that you try the free software that came with your camera/computer/scanner. It will handle most of the casual photographer’s needs and will be fairly easy to learn. If, like me, you have grand delusions about sharing your photos with the world, PhotoImpact 6 can be a good choice. By focusing on one area of graphics, P.I.6 has developed strong applications for editing, enhancing, managing, and Web-enabling digital photos. The cost of all that power is in the time and commitment required to become proficient with its many tools. Still the cost in time and money is much less than a general painting program like Photoshop.

List Price $100 ($80 on Amazon.com) A limited-time trial version is downloadable from www.ulead.com.

Intel® Pentium® or above compatible system. Microsoft® Windows® 95/98/NT4.0 SPE (or above) or Windows® 2000. 64MB of RAM, 240 MB of available hard disk space, CD-ROM Drive, True Color or High Color display and monitor. Mouse or WinTab Compatible pressure-sensitive graphics tablet (optional.) Ulead Systems 20000 Mariner Ave, Suite #200 Torrance, CA 90503Tel: 310-896-6388 Fax: 310-896-6389 Tech Support: 310-896-6391