Ulead PhotoImpact 10 - Professional Image Editing Made Easy Description:

Ulead PhotoImpact 10 - Professional Image Editing Made Easy review:
5 stars (Best Photo Editor) - I believe I have gone through every Photo Editor Trial out there, and this is by far the best. Yes even better than great and glorious photoshop. why? cause it's user friendly. you dont have to be a technical geek. im not one of them, and i could figure out how to use all the tools before i lost my creativity.

and for fifty something dollars! this is truly worth the buy. if only i had the money, hahaha.

on a more personal note, this program allowed me to do some art that saved my life really it did. so i guess this is a thanks to ulead, your 30 day trial saved my life, and helped my imagination run free.
4 stars (Flexible works at all levels) - This is a interesting software package to work with. You can obtain very good results with little knowledge with the single 'autofix' button to choose from the multitude of preset buttons for creating lots of standard corrections and effects. The software is even capable of changing the 'look' of the preset buttons to a 'preview' of the change to your photograph. The presets are a scripts of various individual tools. You can create your own scripts, combining tools in any order you wish. You can also work with each tool independently either with presets for that specific tool or by using the controls to create your own degree of effect.



Almost every tool, allows you to see simultaneous before and after views of the change or split screen before and after combination of the photograph being changed. You can also apply any effect as a 'preview' and can undo any tool, script to any level.



I particularly like the choice of selection tools. Besides the standard selection by color, you can choose with several different methods/tools. They have a smart extraction tool that lets you paint a broad outline of the area(s) you want to select and the software does the dirty work (provided there is enough contrast/color difference) to give you a fine division between the subjects. The video shows them selecting out a pug from a photograph and using him on a geometric background created with other tools. Layers, paths, 3D, animation, and the ability to use 3rd party Photoshop (.8bf type) plugins are also part of the package's features.



Additional effects such as adding "Lighting" to a shot can be lots of fun. I have a shot of the top of the Pierre Hotel in NYC taken on a bright sunny day, which looks like 'sleeping beauty's castle' and turned it into one with a lightning strike on a dark night. You can cut out the backgrounds and put fireworks or overlay the fireworks on existing backgrounds just to name a few.



The biggest bonus of the package is that it comes with Video lessons and there are additional lessons available on the Ulead website. I admit that there are some areas that are confusing in the manual, but they are made up by the clarity of the videos and the additional tutorials on the web site. Be prepared to spend a lot of happy time playing with your photographs.
5 stars (PhotoImpact Gets it Done) - I have used a number of photo editors from Photoshop Professional to some of the original programs in the early 80's and I find Version 10 to have almost every feature that I would want in an editor. Since I used version 5 for a number of years the learning curve for me was pretty flat. I do especially like the touch-up feature as I do photo touch up frequently. The clone features are still there as well as a red eye repair which I often see with pictures taken with digital cameras. I do appreciate the simplfied version of the tool bar which appears at the top when a tool is selected and the ease of toggling to a full version of the tool features on the right of the screen with a simple tab to move in and it out of the way for a full view. A really great product worth the money. Might take the novice to photo editing a bit of time to find all the "goodies" but well worth spending a bit of time to learn..