PhotoImpact 8

by Ulead

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000068D9B
• Item model number: A30-480-111-0A0000
• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 27, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,327 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

Organize and edit your photos, and share them online or on CD with PhotoImpact 8. This version offers a huge range of tools for tidying up images, adding a little extra oomph, and then getting your creations where they need to go.

While the workspace may seem rather cluttered when you have all the toolbars, option bars, and palettes open, the Palette Manager lets you dock and hide palettes easily. You can also record a set of editing steps to reuse later. Tools like the Post-processing wizard (to fix problems like redeye) and the EasyPalette (which lets you browse fills, effects, shapes, text styles, and templates) help you get great results without being an expert.

Combining several images is easier with the Match Background and Defringe features, which prevent your additions from sticking out like sore thumbs. The selection tools let you select several areas in one image at once, and you use control points to get your selection to cover exactly the area you need. Effects range from subtle to dramatic, including animated Particle Effects like rain and fire and the eye-catching Star Filter that adds some sparkle.

PhotoImpact 8 doesn't just convert your pictures to the right format for Web pages; it builds the Web pages for you, including JavaScript effects to create an album with controls to move from picture to picture. You can also burn an album onto CD. The printing controls are excellent for printing several photos in a range of sizes and shaped, from thumbnails to CD labels.

With this many features, you'll need to take the time to find out where everything is to make the most of it, so it's good to see that PhotoImpact 8 comes with the kind of comprehensive printed manual that's becoming all too rare. You also get GIF Animator--the definitive program for creating Web animations--and PhotoImpact Album for organizing your images.

Instead of features for professional graphics designers, PhotoImpact 8 sticks to tools for photo enthusiasts, including some innovative options you won't find elsewhere. --Mary Branscombe

Product Description

98/W2K/WME/XP

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars By Far the Best $$$ish Image Editor, August 26, 2003

By 

Yuri Gordunov (Lafayette, IN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: PhotoImpact 8 (CD-ROM)

I recently received the assignment from my boss to evaluate the various digital photography/image editing programs in the ~$$$ price range. Included were:

- Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0
- Microsoft Digital Image Pro 9.0
- Ulead PhotoImpact 8.0
- Jasc Paintshop Pro 9.0

My review centered around three criteria: image mainpulation, advanced design and photo effects, and suitability for making web graphics. I spent a total of 16 hours on the various programs performing a pretty intensive evaluation in order to determine which product to select for our business. (We needed to purchase a large site license and so there was a lot of $$$ at stake.)

I will tell you that, much to my surprise, PhotoImpact came out on top - not just overall but in each of the three areas individually, as well. I say "to my surprise" because it's definitely the underdog. It doesn't have the kind of sensationalism that the other seem to have, and you don't see it advertised all that much. But it's definitely the champ.

I found PhotoImpact and Paintshop Pro the easiest to use when it came to digital photography features. (Photoshop Elements was far too difficult for business use, and Digital Image Pro far too simplistic, in my opinion.) But PhotoImpact takes the cake in this area because its drag-and-drop orientation is very straightforward.

When it comes to the higher-end design features, PhotoImpact was the clear winner. It supports Adobe's plug-in architecture, so all of the cool filters you can get for Photoshop (and elements, for that matter) are compatible with PhotoImpact. But PhotoImpact gives you a much greater degree of control over customizability than Photoshop Elements, the no. 2 contended in this second area, in my opinion. Once again, it's very easy to create some spectacular effects: There's built-in sophisticated vector drawing (which none of the other evaluated products have), as well as 3D text with some outstanding effects.

And, lastly, in the area of web graphics, PhotoImpact came in tops with Paintshop Pro following second. PhotoImpact has a great system for compressing GIFs, plus it includes a GIF animation application that's really sweet.

Anyway, I hope this helps all you image editing shoppers. Wish I had seen this sort of review upfront; it would have made the decision much easier for me,

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Ulead loses the lead, February 19, 2003

By 

Dr. Johnson "Sam" (Washington, US) - See all my reviews

This review is from: PhotoImpact 8 (CD-ROM)

Ulead's PhotoImpact 8 continues the Ulead tradition of cramming tons of useful features into a relatively inexpensive program. The previous version of the product received top ratings from a number of leading sites such as CNET. Version 8, in my opinion, adds very few new features that would justify the upgrade for most people. And unfortunately, the very strength of this program is also its Achilles' heel. Since it packs in so many features (photo editing, vector graphics, 3D features, HTML page creation, etc.), it has become a huge install (over 500 MB if you install everything). Further, it is extremely slow to load at startup. I have a 2.0 Ghz pentium with 512 MB RAM, and it can still take between 20 and 40 seconds to fully load the program. Many users have indicated problems with stability and program crashes, though I have not experienced this yet. And many of the extra features such as the HTML page creation and the javascript rollovers are of questionable value for the following reasons:

1) They tend to create VERY basic output, as with the HTML page creation, and you can probably do better on your own or with any inexpensive web page tools.

2) These extra functions sound good on paper, but in reality they only contribute to the huge installation size, the slow loading of the program, and the cluttering of the already overcrowded menus.

PhotoImpact 8 can be a great graphics program and an alternative to expensive options such as Adobe Photoshop. In the low end of the price spectrum , your two best options are PhotoImpact and Paint Shop Pro. But Paint Shop Pro, long the market leader in this price range, has regained the lead. They have just come out with their version 8 Beta, and it is truly an elegant program. It is fast, a much smaller install, and limits itself to just being a great graphics editor (rather than trying to do everything like PhotoImpact). Ultimately it's hard to go wrong with either one, but I believe Ulead has lost the lead, and Paint Shop Pro has regained it.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great buy for the money, December 30, 2002

By 

Doug Lester (Portsmouth, VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: PhotoImpact 8 (CD-ROM)

I've used both Photoimpact 6 and 7 and 8 just gets better. I've had none of the installation problems listed above. My CPU is an AMD 1.2gig unit and I have 650+ megs of memmory. I have the program installed on its own 40 gig hard drive. I use the program for digital photography only so I can't say how it does on Web pages, but for what I use it for, I don't think that I have even started to make a dent into what can be done with it. I find removing unwanted details from a poto easy with the right tools and enhancing a photo is easier still.

One thing, especially if you are dealing with 3.0 megapix or higher resolution or if you deal with uncompressed photos, get as much memory, hard drive space, and the fastest CPU you can afford. At near minimal requirements, working with these large files will define the word slow.