Fr. Jacob Myers

March 15, 2001

PhotoImpact 6 is one fine photo editing program. It is filled with features and is more so now with this newest version that has added Web imaging solutions that provide a complete set of tools to create professional Web graphics, animation, rollovers and output finished Web pages directly to HTML. In the hundred dollar range, I would recommend this product to anyone who did not want to pay the higher price of Photoshop. Ulead is not bold enough to claim that PhotoImpact 6.0 rivals Photoshop 6.0, but they are bold enough to say that their product has some features Photoshop does not have, and that their program is a great product to have in addition to Photoshop. I would agree, and go a step further. The added graphics that are included in PhotoImpact as well as the very interesting and easy to use filters makes the program quite appealing apart from any comparison to Photoshop. What you see below are not pictures actually but what the effect of say Lightening will look like in "your picture." All you do is drag the effect you wish onto the picture you have and it appears as a part of your picture.

Their editing tools are easy to use, and they have also incorporated a new feature also found in Photoshop 6.0 whereby when you click on the tool you are about to use, an Attribute bar appears with all the qualities of that tool available for easy access. You can also see some of the easy to use effects in the picture below that were merely dragged onto the masked photo of the "skipper."

Another interesting new feature is that the library of vector objects which are included like the sample below are fully editable by ungrouping the vector images you can take pieces off of them as I did with the watch below.

And here is a feature that even Photoshop does not have. It allows you to combine vector and bitmap images. I am taking both the photo of the skipper above which is a bitmap and combining it with the watch which is a vector image below which is really a great feature:

And then there is the new stamp tool, which stamps vector images like the choices below right onto your photo. Corel's Photo-Paint has this feature and it is a very nice one to have use of to augment any photo:

PhotoImpact is also chock full of web graphics and is prepared to have you design a simple web page right in PhotoImpact or to use the program as a supplement to your regular Web design program like Microsoft FrontPage. Included are a series of Web tools that make designing a page a snap. For example the if you begin with the background of the page the background designer allows for many interesting choices for the page including 22 built-in texture groups and 110 customizable palette ramps, 20 background presets with adjustable density and frequency controls, allowing also for single color background or image files if you wish:

A huge selection in the Component Designer makes adding flair to a page easy with 800 ready to use components including rollovers, buttons, banners, separators, bullets, button bars, and icons:

  Many of the elements in, for example the button designer are fully editable like the buttons I chose below:

PhotoImpact allows text to be directly inserted into your Web project and generate the corresponding HTML code when you save it for the Web. The program allows for one to specify text attributes including font, size, color and background which can be reformatted at anytime:

PhotoImpact contains a full set of creativity tools complete with extended customization options including Pressure Sensitive Graphic Tablet support with erase awareness, 12 Paint brushes including Paintbrush, Airbrush, Crayon, and Chalk, 9 Clone brushes like Bristle, Oil Paint, and Marker, 14 Retouch brushes such as Dodge, Burn, and Smudge: 

And there seems to be more and more tools including the ability to create 2D or 3D text and objects that advantage of vector-based editing. There is an image slicer for improved Web functionality and faster downloads. There is an Animation Studio that adds animation to text, images, and objects. There is a quite refined text wrap that lets you creatively distort text for impressive results. Of course in a program like this there is a GIF Animator with a full set of animation presets:

For the graphics that you do create there is a JPG Image Optimizer to insure that you get good quality in your web graphics but at the same time are providing a fast downloadable web site not filled with graphics that are to large to load quickly:

Truthfully, I am almost out of breath from the amount of features this program has. To finish off, included is a Web Album and Slide show that allows for the storing of thousands of images:

Ulead has really left nothing out of this program...it has everything. It is truly a great program to own.

Copyright 2001, Jacob Myers, All Rights Reserved