BIOS: Technology Means Business

The image-editing market is a one-horse race for graphics professionals - Adobe's Photoshop has held onto the lead for a number of years thanks to its high-end features, cross-platform support and a strong (and loyal) user base. For non-professionals, there's actually a raft of applications that are much easier to use and represent better value for money. Along with Jasc's Paint Shop Pro and Adobe's Photoshop Elements, Ulead Systems' PhotoImpact XL (aka PhotoImpact 8.5) is certainly worth considering if you need a powerful program that offers plenty of creative features. PhotoImpact XL is not just an image-editing program though, and new users will benefit from separate utilities for on-the-fly visual image management, GIF animation, immersive panorama creation and a decent cataloguing program. You also get a screen capture utility and tons of plug-in filters, making PhotoImpact XL one of the most complete and comprehensive image-editing suites available for under £100.

Pros: High-end features; Web and vector tools; excellent value
Cons: Windows only; idiosyncratic menus; initially overwhelming

PhotoImpact XL provides an excellent set of tools for those who want to create professional results without the steep learning curve of Photoshop. It's also great value and comes with a number of add-on utilities, such as Photo Explorer 8.0 (management tool used to organise and search your collection of photos, videos and audio clips), GIF Animator 5.0 (compose animations frame by frame), Cool 360 (panoramic imaging software), PhotoImpact Album XL, as well as a 45-minute video tutorial. If that's not enough, a second CD-ROM (included with boxed version of the software only) contains 2000 royalty-free images, four Alien Skin plug-in filters, 1200 Hemera stock photos and 300 animations.

Image-editing applications are essential if you want to get the best from your digital photographs. They're also vital if you work with graphics for your livelihood, or if you just play around with photos and graphics for fun. PhotoImpact XL lets you capture and organise photographs from a digital camera or file, enhance and refine images with the use of filters and effects, and then save or share those images. It also allows you to draw 2D and 3D vector graphics, add still or animated special effects to photos and images, as well as produce graphics and animations for the Web. The software even comes with tools to create full - albeit basic - HTML Web pages, JavaScript effects and interactive photo slideshows.

Existing PhotoImpact users may be less enthusiastic to upgrade as the main enhancements to this latest release are far from groundbreaking. Key among the new features includes an ExpressFix wizard that analyses photos and automatically presents various options to fix them (such as improper colour, unbalanced exposure, or out-of-focus photos) and a colour cast removal tool that removes any colour incorrectly dominating an image. There's also a Beautify Skin filter that lets you retouch skin areas by removing blemishes, soften the tone, and change colours.

PhotoImpact XL is a little overwhelming at first due to way the screen is littered with floating toolbars and there are masses of icons on the menu bars. However, similar to any other image-editing program, you'll soon become familiar with the workspace and toolbars. PhotoImpact provides an assortment of management tools, but it emphasises a visual approach to producing fast results. For instance, the new ExpressFix feature provides a step-by-step window that automatically presents generated thumbnails of your image with varying degrees of brightness, contrast, colour cast, saturation, focus and so on. All you have to do is sequentially select the ones that catch your eye and which you feel improve your image.

PhotoImpact XL's real strengths are its filters. While its always majored on eye-catching special effects, the latest release adds some impressive new capabilities. A Multi-Vision filter creates multiple mirror images of a central object (create from 3 to 25 identical images), a Moon filter lets you place a view of the moon into an image, and a Sunlight filter brings out vivid colours on photos that were taken on less than perfect days. There's also a Diffraction filter that adds more life and colour to photos by adorning them with rainbows. Of course, you can also go mad with special effects to add life to plain-looking images, such as blurring or warping an image, applying lighting effects, or adding a film grain effect to give pictures an antique look.

Links:
PhotoImpact XL Web site
PhotoImpact XL 30-day trial (42.2MB)