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Ulead PhotoImpact 10

$90

PhotoImpact 10 comes with some powerful, unique photo editing features that may be worth the purchase price alone, but it suffers from lackluster sharing options and a strangely redundant organizer. This package works better as a companion program than as your main editing software.

Organizing

PhotoImpact 10 comes with three organizers: The internal browser manager works like Photoshop CS's File Browser. The bundled PhotoImpact Album 10 application resembles the old Photoshop Album, only it's less versatile. And the Photo Explorer module of PhotoImpact 10 is something in between the browser manager and Album. The three-organizer setup has overlaps, with no individual piece being outstanding.

In PhotoImpact Album 10, you can choose themed album configurations--such as General Purpose, Family Album, Photographer's Album, or Real Estate Portfolio--with predefined fields. If one of the templates works for you, you're set. If not, you'll discover that creating a customized album can be a painstaking process. A convenient command called Tile With Album automatically resizes thumbnails in a column along any side of the PhotoImpact workspace. PhotoImpact Album doesn't provide thumbnails for RAW files, but it does list them.

Editing

PhotoImpact 10's user interface takes some getting used to, but a few of its editing tools are worth the effort.

The new High Dynamic Range feature lets you easily combine photos taken at two different exposures to get an extended range of definition in both highlights and shadows. The program is intelligent enough to combine two pictures taken without a tripod and (therefore) having different proportions and framing. If you are a landscape photographer, the ease of use of this feature justifies the purchase price. PhotoImpact 10's Lens Distortion command has one of the slickest interfaces we've seen, permitting interactive correction of both lens and parallax distortion, using adjustable grid lines. The software also contains a better-than-average noise reduction filter, with sliders for making subtle fix-as-you-go tweaks.

Other notable features: The Color Cast command helps you remove color casts caused by mixed lighting or reflections. Choosing the command brings up a dialog box that lets you sample a color that should be neutral in the original photo. That color then shows up on a color wheel. Dragging that color to the wheel's center removes the color cast.

Beautify Skin is a one-click fix for subtle skin problems such as blotchiness or big pores (it won't totally erase wrinkles). The Rotate in Virtual 3D command, which rotates 2D images in virtual 3D, can perform a neat trick when you're creating composite shots. Say you want to put the subject of picture A in front of the background of picture B, but the pictures were taken from different perspectives. You can use the Rotate in Virtual 3D command to correct the perspective of the foreground subject so that it more closely matches the orientation of the background matter.

Sharing

When it comes to sharing, PhotoImpact offers little and PhotoImpact Album offers only slightly more, covering just the basics. You can export a group of pictures from PhotoImpact Album 10 to a slide show that can then be e-mailed, uploaded to a Web site, or exported to a CD; this gives you a cheap, convenient way to distribute a portfolio. You can automate the production of a Web gallery, too--but instead of the templated approach of, say, Photoshop Elements, PhotoImpact uses a wizard that takes you through layout and formatting options. People who want more control over customization than a template allows will prefer this method.

Professional photographer Ken Milburn has written numerous books and articles on digital photography, including Digital Photography: Expert Techniques (O'Reilly Media).