I'd just like to say that I am taking about the new Photoimpact here - Photoimpact 8!!!!
Photoimpact 7 was so packed full of goodies that it's hard to imagine what Ulead could do to its flagship program to take it any further. But it seems to have found a way, and Photimpact 8 is the result.
It slots neatly into the mid-range image-editing market, alongside Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro. It's far more sophisticated than buget-entry offerings like Photo Express and Microsoft Picture It, but it doesn't really aspire to the professional heights of Photshop itself.
It's not through lack of trying though. Aswell as the array of tools in Photoimapct 8 itself, the program comes with two stand-alone packages that are pretty impressive in their own right.
Photoimpact 8 is a combined image browser and catloguing application - the equivolent of Media Center 3.1, shipped with Jascs Paint shop Pro anniversary Edition. GIF animator 5, meanwhile, is Uleads rival to Jascs animation Shop 3. GIF animator 5, though is so far ahead of its rival, that there's no competition.
So what exactly has Ulead done to tempt existing Photoimpact users into upgrading, or users of other programs to jumping ship?
Recognising the exponential growth in digital photography, Ulead has pitched many of its digital enhancements at digital camera users. The auto processing commands are improved, as are the lighting compensation tools, lens distortion, Tone Map and Level dialogs. All of these help make digital enhancement quicker and better.
There are new "camera" filters too - Star, Gradient, Spot, Diffuse Glow - designed to mimic the effect of those effects filter kits that first appeared in the eighties.
Now you can burn packaged albums, web albums and slideshows onto CD's or DVD's which you can distribute among your friends and relatives. On the editing side, you can now alter lasso sections using adjustable points, edit text directly on screen and create selections using colour ranges.
There are lots of really worthwhile improvements in Photoimpact 8 that reinforce its capabilities as an all-round graphics tool. But inevitably, as more and more stuff is added, the interface gets fatter and thats always been Photoimpact's problem. It's like having a garage full of every tool in the world - nice, but it takes you all morning to find the right spanner.
Photoimpact 8 is so astonishingly powerful and versatile that it seems churlish to start moaning about how it does things. After all, if you spend hours and hours with this program, really getting under its skin, you'll discover amazing power and potential. However if you don't, you're likely to spend most of your time confused and dazzled. So what package you choose depends on just how interested you are in learning. For most, and particularly beginners, the greater accessibility of Adobe's excellent Photo Shop Elements 2 makes it a better choice.
------------------------------------------------------ Specifications: Pentium, Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, 64MB RAM (128MB reccomended), 500Md Hard disk space. ------------------------------------------------------Contact: Ulead 01327 844880 ------------------------------------------------------Website: www.ulead.co.uk ------------------------------------------------------ Pricing: £77-90 ------------------------------------------------------
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Nov 10th, 2002
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