A Barbershop, A Laundry and A Handyman all in one (PhotoImpact 8.0)

Member Name: callancool

Product:	PhotoImpact 8.0
Date:	21/11/05 (1187 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Experts No3 photo editor, Beginner friendly, web page creator, amazing range of tools and filter,

Disadvantages: some tools hard to find

Introduction.

Photo editing was always something of a 'No no!' For the average punter. If they could be bothered walking down the high street, buying a film, putting in the camera, trudging back to the store to get the film developed, that was all they could do. If the pictures didn't come out properly there wasn't anything they could do. True, many photo shops also offered photo restoration, but this involved physically painting out the blemishes and re-photographing the result, giving a slight but noticeable loss in quality. And if the photo was totally underexposed there was nothing that could be done. Then there was the awkwardness loading the film. Whilst a 110 or 126 cartridge was a doddle to load and unload, those wanting serious quality results were stuck with 35 mm film, which was, by nature, fiddly to load, and if it wasn't done in darkness, carried the risk of ruining the entire film. With the advent of scanners and digital imaging cameras and software in the 80's (it's hard to imagine that in those days they had scanners and in the late 80's Megapixel digital SLR's that would run on old 8086's, isn't it?), photo editing on computer was popular with the professionals, but the software was still limited. Most professionals still used film SLR's and the software wasn't as advanced as it is nowadays.

It was only in the mid 90's with the advent of affordable flatbed scanners, that photo editing took off. At last home users had the ability to transfer their prized snaps onto computer and improve them. Professionals had by then long been using Adobe's 'Photo shop' software to enhance the photo's taken for magazine and TV adverts, but the cost was prohibitive to the consumer. There were two main alternatives, Paint Shop Pro, a highly acclaimed shareware programme, and Adobe's 'Photo Deluxe' professional editor. Whilst Paint Shop Pro (Psp) had always been classed as 'Awkward' to use, Photo Deluxe had a graphically attractive user interface and held the users hand through simple image enhancing and projects such as cards and calendars. But it was still a chore scanning photo's onto a PC and making sure you scanned it in straight and at the best resolution for printing without generating megabyte monstrosities.

Since then, the digital camera revolution has meant that photo editors have become ten a penny. As with scanners before, there are the basic image editors given away with cheap digital cameras, which hold the users hand through a variety of projects or limited and very basic one click image enhancers such as MGI Photosuite, Arcsoft Photo Impression, and Ulead's own Photo Express (which is basically a cut down version of Photo Impact). Then there's the aforementioned professional editors 'Photo shop' and 'Psp'. It's said that you could use a copy of photo shop for years and still only have used it to 50% of its capabilities, whilst 'Paint Shop Pro' users maintain that it does everything Photo shop does and more for a quarter of the price. But it's user friendliness has always been a problem, and even the latest version hasn't got it right.

In-between the professional end packages and the basic software often given away with cameras and scanners lie several products targeted at the user who want's to do more than just fix brightness and contrast, yet either cannot afford or is unwilling to pay the full price of Photo shop or Paint shop pro. It's hard justifying Psp's £99 price tag, let alone Photo Shop's exuberant £400 plus cost (although you can upgrade to the latest version for about 1/3 of the cost provide you have previously purchased a full version). To make Photo shop appeal more to the Psp user Adobe Launched a cut down version, 'Photo shop Elements' which retails for similar price. True, they both feature contain many more features than the average home user will ever need, or even want for that matter. That's where Ulead comes in. It's flagship programme is 'Photo Impact' (PI) is rated as the best of the rest, and can do most tasks Photo Shop, Psp and Elements can do. One of the reason Photo shop is held in such high esteem is that it's auto fix solutions to problems like focus, brightness and contrast, colour balance and other one click fixes is that they are pretty much spot on. Psp isn't far behind, though the other editors all seem to have had problems in that respect, Photo Impact included. Indeed version 4 (see my review, 'Easy Peasy Photo Editing.') Had severe problems with the auto correct functions for brightness and contrast, making it totally unreliable. This was rectified to an extent in version 6, but it wasn't perfect. Indeed no packages come close to Photo shop and Psp in this respect.

Why Photo Impact 8?

Ulead always claim to be a forward thinking company, and are so confident of the quality of their products that they give them away for free. Well not exactly, you do have to pay for them, but if you're a canny shopper like me, you won't pay more than a fiver for them. In order to attract customers for life, Ulead either give cut down versions away with cameras and scanners, or give older versions away with magazines upon the launch of their latest version, coupled with a 30 day trial and cut price offer for the current version (version 10 in this case). I picked up version 8 on the December edition of Personal Computer World magazine for £3.25, but I expect it will make an appearance on several other magazines priced around the £5 mark in the next few months. If you only have the basic or cut down image editing software that came with your camera or scanner then this is an excellent way to get more creative with your photo's without shelling a fortune out on software. For example, as well as having loads of templates, frames and overlays to enhance your picture (such as firework, rain, or thunder), the programme can mimic many lighting effects, like dawn and dusk It's also a basic web page editor with ready made templates and the package comes with it's own GIF editing package for creating web based animations. There are almost 350 photo frames which can be applied to your photographs to make them more attractive, and a raft of other improvements, such as a skin tone enhancer (how many times have your photo's looked good but suffered from pale looking skin?), a lighting enhancer to improve the lighting conditions of a badly lit photograph, as well as the usual filters for enhancing or altering your photos. In short, it comes close to matching Psp and Elements on features alone, but for a much smaller price tag.

What Can It Do?

Well, with Photo Impact 8 you have very powerful tools at your disposal. You can Sharpen, blur, crop, rotate, fix exposure, remove red eye, add decorative frames, warp, distort, turn sepia or monochrome, remove noise, re-size and a whole lot more. There are many photo formats you can save your images as, including the relatively new JPEG 2000 (.J2K) file format offering less loss with comparable file sizes to normal Jpegs. To fully describe what the programme can do would take up a book, but as my version is a cover mount then such as luxury is not afforded to us cheapskates. Suffice to say, that unless you work with images for a living then Photo impact will serve you well, and you probably won't need to upgrade.

New Menu Layout.

One of the things that has been added since version 4 is the ability to customise the toolbar as to your personal preferences. It's annoying and time consuming when your most frequently used items are tucked away within the menus of the programme. Thus it was to my delight that I was able to add items such as save as, focus, re-size, remove red eye and others to the toolbar. This will save me a lot time as I'm now able to access these items without wading through a long list of menu items. This feature was also in version six, though as I never used version 5 I'm unsure as to when it was added.

Basic Enhancement tools.

PI has always been easy to use for the beginner and PI 8 is no exception.. Long long ago, (okay not that long ago, it was in 1998) I bought a brand new flatbed scanner for £50.00 in Cash Converters (I always drop on bargains - £50 for a new £60 scanner and 12 weeks to pay). I needed to scan some images to my 486 and so it was I tried Photo Deluxe that came with it, at the time a whopping 50 MB on my hard drive (manually uninstalling it as Win 3.1 had no add/remove (yes I ran a scanner on 3.1 but that's another story) left 15Mb hidden in the Windows directory). That didn't have the right tools for the job so I installed an old shareware version of Psp, but it was awkward to use and didn't seem to do much for me.

The scanner was mothballed after a while, and two computers down the line, I bought my first digital camera, a 0.1 MP Polaroid Digital 320 (see my review) with no flash. After scanning my old cover discs for one with an image editor on as it only came with that awful cosmopolitan makeover software (well you should know me and my bargains by now - £20 brand new in 2001) I noticed PI 4 on one of my discs. I was wary about using it as I thought it would be awkward to use, but it was in fact very easy. Straight away, I took to the way Ulead gave the user a selection of thumbnails to help them decide how they could sharpen or adjust an image, without using the complicated guess work Psp required as there wasn't an adequate preview pane in the version I had.

That ease of use has been maintained down the line, and as the user is presented with a series of thumbnails to choose from there isn't much guesswork involved. I must say though, that the thumbnails (probably because they are thumbnails) have a tendency to look a little over sharp, but the image preview that follows id a full size image, and a menu box gives the user the option of discarding the changes, or going back to redo it. That panel also has an undo button which changes to redo if you undo the change so you can click it a couple of times to decide if you like the enhancement. One word of warning though, if you click undo, and then click OK, the effect IS applied, and you have to use the undo button in the toolbar. You must click cancel after clicking undo in the preview box. There is also a series of auto enhance buttons in the Format menu which as the name suggests, automatically does all the work for you. Whilst PI 4 got this horribly wrong (often you'd get way to much contrast, making it look like that effect they used to put on Top Of The Pops in the 70's - isn't it amazing how simple it was to get that effect and we watched every week and never knew), subsequent versions have improved on this significantly.

As for undoing mistakes, while PI 4 had a limited number of undo levels possible PI 8 lets you select how many undo levels you want, up to a massive 200.

The most common tools used by beginners are found in the Format menu. The easiest things to achieve are fixing the focus and brightness and contrast. Brightness and contrast can be corrected in one of two ways. Firstly, you can use the plus and minus buttons in the left side toolbar to manually adjust them. This is ideal for digital shots as many cameras are a tiny bit out in over exposure but not by much. Alternatively, you can use the menu command to select from a variety of pre-set levels (of which you can also select the level of variation between the thumbnails you can choose from), or go it your own way and use the sliders to manipulate brightness, contrast and gamma for the entire selection, or for each of the three RGB (red, green and blue channels). This makes it possible to recreate those heat or infra red camera shots you see on those army documentaries. Focus is still as easy to use as ever with the thumbnails, although if you like Psp and Elements, clicking the options tab brings up a slider and large before and after thumbnails to assist you. You can also choose to view either before or after thumbnails as well. As I mentioned in a previous paragraph, with both Brightness and Focus tools (as with almost every other effect) you have the option of a full size preview of any changes you make before you apply it. And there is the option for the programme to automatically fix this for you, though in practice, doing things manually often achieves the best results.

Other basic tools include Colour Correction buttons situated just above the brightness and contrast buttons on the left side toolbar (working in the same way and you can have complete control if you use the menus for this) which allows quick and easy removal of colour casts, though for serious colour problems it's not that effective, Red eye removal (the only thing to have gone worse with each improvement of PI in my opinion), cropping and rotating, and selection tools. The Red eye is very effective, but is much harder to use. In PI4 although the eye select tool was a small fixed size circle, clicking on the eye and then magnifying the thumbnail until the correct area was achieved was simple as it automatically zoomed in to where you selected. In subsequent editions, you started out with a very large selection tool, which you have to manually re-size from 20 down to 2 or 1 to fit the eyes. And the zoom tool no longer fixes in on the eye you selected, meaning you have to move around the thumbnail until you find the eye - for each successive zoom. Couple this with the fact that while a level of 2 in PI6 was suitable for most shots, a level of 1 in PI8 is often still too large as though the zoom tool is infinite, once you get past a certain zoom level, the area selected no longer gets smaller. If it did, you could zoom to your hearts content and get the perfect sized area, but alas, this is not possible, so you end up with an area too big or too small. This means that if you go too small you have a small but visible red rim around the area you selected, whereas, if you go too big, you have to reduce the strength of the effect so as not to leave dark patches of colour on the skin, resulting in a red eye of a weaker intensity. You can also easily align your image horizontally, vertically, or even centrally, taking the hassle out of it. Cloning, smudging dodging and other brushes are all easy to select from this panel. The Warp brush is my favourite as it lets me distort images with hilarious results.

Easy Peasy Palette.

Without a doubt in my mind, the heart of PI8 lies in it's easy palette, which lets you select most of the effects contained within it's 15 main galleries, each containing a whole host of sub galleries. The most impressive is the animation gallery which lets you apply animated effects like snow, rain, ripples, colourful fireworks and violent thunderstorms to your work. but be warned, it's a crawler to apply. Whether you fancy fireflies, stars or bubbles over your work, or create spectacular text effects, there'll be an suitable effect in one of the galleries. It's also in here that you can choose your brush sizes. The palette can be accessed from the main toolbar or applied to the desktop as a floating mini toolbar.

Your Flexible Friend.

The new Access panel has many features. With it you can easily access all your layers, selections and open documents, as well as browse all your images explorer style with the Browse Manager feature. In PI4, you had no visual preview of an entire folder, just a single preview of an image you selected before opening it, which made browsing for images a pain. (Perhaps this was because mine was the cut down version). In PI6 you had a Visual open command, which showed the entire directory contents as thumbnails, though when you opened an image this closed. The Browse Manager function in PI8 is similar, but it stays open after you open an image. You can choose the size of thumbnails if you wish and like the Easy Palette, the Access panel stays open as a floating toolbar, maximising when you double click it.


Quick To It Laddie!

The quick command panel is versatile. It is simply an automated task manager which takes care of things such as enhancing photographs, applying effects and other tasks. You then have the option of individually undoing each function applied if you wish. For example, I find that auto processing often crops a photo, so I undo this.


Off The Post!

For those who want more control over the image than the Quick Command or Auto Correct features give, the Post Processing Wizard gives you the manual control by grouping all the main enhancement tools in one. Starting with Straighten, then Crop, Focus, Brightness, Colour Balance, Red Eye, and finishing with Frame and Shadow, you have the individual tools from the Format menu at your disposal. You can play around with the effects and preview them, or you can skip an effect if it's not needed. This gives you the most commonly used tools by beginners in one easy to use tool.


Beauty's Only Skin Deep!

A common fault with digital photographs is that skin tones can often appear faded or weak. The Beautify Skin command lets you enhance skin tomes, or decrease over saturated skin. You can apply several effects from pale sin to a heavy tan or eve sunburn (ouch!).


Frame It.

If you think your pictures good enough to frame, PI8 has 247 ready made ones. There are 5 'Galleries' of frames to choose from, including 2D, 3D, Edge, Magic and Classic, and you can adjust the size of the frame. This is a cheapskates way of avoiding buying expensive photo frames, just print with a frame and laminate, then hang!

TXT Crazy!

If you love TXTing then you'll love the amazing text effects you can add to your photos. Anything from glass to metal to embossed effects can be used to make stunning text effects. And its as simple as typing, selecting, and applying your desired style. Some effects are plain, but most are 3D, and you also have the option to make your normal text 3D as well. The only downside to this is that text typed can be very slow to appear on screen if you pre select an effect first, so rather than select the effect and then type. Once in place it can be positioned anywhere you like on screen. Another pain is the fact that it often takes several clicks for text to be selected and I find I click so fast I select and then accidentally deselect it.


Filter Tips!

Photo Impact 8 comes with a plethora of ready made filters including sharpen, blur, gaussian blur, particle effects, find edges, magic gradients, adjust for PAL or NTSC, as well as a custom filter designer. Whether you're a complete novice like me, or an experienced graphic designer, there'll be a filter that will suit your needs. If not, you can import thousands of Photo Shop filters which can be found on the cover discs of photography magazines or downloaded from the web. And speaking of the web.......


World Wide Wonders!

Web page creation is effortless with PI8. Apart from the text the text flaws, the only other downside to web creation is button creation. Whilst in theory you can make buttons any shape you like in practice I couldn't do it. I was only able to make square, circular and oval buttons. Re-sizing large buttons only seemed to leave you with a quarter of a button, and you had to re-size the original image. The round buttons I created of a smiling face ended up looking like an upturned jam tart foil case as I couldn't make it smooth button round shape, so if any of you out there know how to do it in PI8, please let me know. As for page layout, you simply choose your page size and background style, then paste in any buttons text, photos or objects you desire and move them around to your desired location. Hyper links are easy too, as all you do is enter the target location in the box.

There's also a properties editor in which you can put the title of the page, and any key words to help search engines find your site more easily. You can also combine images to make rollovers, create blinking text, and create slices, as well as creating animated GIFs to help build a top notch site. If you're dandy with HTML (which I'm not) then you can check the automatically generated code for errors, and directly edit the code if you prefer. As I've no programming skills, I'm sticking to the basic DTP style of design. It's coming slowly, but it will create a great looking site when it's finished.

And Finally...... (I can't believe it... The Last Paragraph....... Yippee!) Or is it?.......

Well, there you have it. Ulead Photo Impact 8. 6 pages of review and I haven't even touched on the professional features. If I did it would probably take a book to list them all, and I haven't got the time to write one. PI8 is such a versatile programme with so many features that the average home user will never use. For ease of use combined with value for money features, Photo Impact has always been unrivalled. In fact, the latest version costs just £50.00 compared with over £75 for most of its rivals. And if you buy it off the December PCW magazine and like it so much you want to upgrade, there's a special offer to upgrade to version 10 for just half that price, £25.00. Me? I'm just a skinflint, and in a years time I'll probably buy it on another cover disc for a bargain price.

Summary: Superb photo editor.

Variety of features:
Reliability:
User friendly:
Installation:
Update possibilites: