Software and Hardware Reviews

Ulead PhotoImpact 11

Reviewed by Robert Vitale

The software world of consumer photographic tools is a very competitive arena in today's market. Ulead has been a player for many years and is one of the leaders in the multimedia software field. Their newest photo-editing consumer tool is PhotoImpact 11. It is the result of a long line of product enhancements. Their first graphic product come out in 1989. Just as a side note, the name Ulead is a Chinese word meaning "Strength Through Friendship."

PhotoImpact 11 (PI11) is an "Everything for everyone product." What do I mean? Most photo-editing products place themselves on one of three main levels of a user base. First is the simple photo-editing software package you get at your local supermarket. The next level is the student or home web designer who needs a package where they can do some simple drop shadow lettering or clean up the old family album of scratches and dust. And the third group is the professional who makes a living at doing graphic work for print- and web-based services. PI11 tries to be an all-in-one. Street priced at around $50, this package delivers a lot of features to try to make all three levels of photo editing user happy at a very competitive price.

PI11 went through a total redesign to make first-time users comfortable in getting their pictures to the workspace. You can see the difference by looking at earlier Ulead packages. I started my task of learning PI11 by downloading some pictures from my digital camera. The 311-page manual looks very complete, but like most users —I started reading the manual and said I will look at it later, maybe. I went to the program help button and read a clear "how-to" for the digital download process. The images loaded without a problem from my Kodak camera (which it recognized) onto the screen for me to begin working.

From this point I could Play , Correct or Work with my pictures. If I wanted to Play with some of the pictures, I had a whole gallery of ready-to-use functions to start doing fun things. PI11 comes with a large clipart package, whereby you can easily add objects to your photo. You can put a frame on your picture, place text in and around your pictures, etc. The list of creative play things you can do to your picture is quite large. I found at lease fifty different kinds of things I could do. With the right combination of buttons, the choices were all laid out for you on the side panels of the screen.

I sometimes need to clean up or correct old pictures for my website. I took one of my needy photos and placed it on the PI11 workspace. This picture had scratches, dust and tears. I found working with the ten different cloning tools and the twelve different paintbrush tools allowed me to correct all of the picture's problems. I really like the touchup tool, where after you clone over one area (like a dust dot in a cloud) it then merged it and smoothed out the cloned area with the rest of the surrounding area. PI11 has a full array of tools to correct many types of problems.

I wanted to see how it Works on a few of my other photos as I wanted to put them on my website. Here again, you have a full bank of tools for both the consumer and the graphic artist to use at their command. The consumer can easily make a simple color correction in a picture, while the graphic artist can change the alpha level of the blues, to bring out some more hues. PI11 will work well in both camps.

For the consumer, PI11 uses a "How does it look" picture chart layout—comparing a ring of pictures (with various slight adjustments) for you to pick from when you want to correct a picture. This style of correction ranged from correcting brightness or skin color to different special effects. And after finding the magic buttons inside the program, you could manipulate the details of the specific correction.

PI11 has a lot of the features you will find in Adobe Photoshop. You can layer items over your graphics. Create masks, title, import, export pictures just like Photoshop to mention a few things. PI11 also has a very complete section on how to arrange and file your photos and how to export them to a website or to Aunt Helen in an email. It gives you many options for printing a single picture or to create an album.

The program's system requirements are pretty standard. Windows XP, Pentium III or compatible processor, CD-ROM drive, 256 MB RAM (that seemed low), 600 MB of disk space and an 800×600 monitor.

As I mentioned in the beginning, this is a very complete "Everything for everyone package." And that is the problem. There were just so many bells and whistles put into this program, you would have to work this package every day to get to know them all. One problem Ulead had to overcome was to create a platform for the graphic artist to work from, while at the same time for the consumer to operate from. Consequently, it allows the user to modify the workspace depending on their needs. In retrospect, I really do not know how Ulead could have done it any better than they did, but I was overloaded on closing this panel and finding that tool. But then you step back and look at the price and compare it to the $500+ Adobe Photoshop. I am amazed at what Ulead PhotoImpact 11 gives you.