Have Your Photos Edited by a Pro: You

The quality of digital cameras is rising while prices are fall ing, sparking sales in

an otherwise dull market for hightech gear. The least expensive cameras are useful mainly

for shooting low-resolution images to be e-mailed or put on Web pages, but many of the

newer products produce pictures that can rival film for most uses. The image-editing

software bundled with these products, as well as the photo-handling applets built into

Windows XP and the Macintosh, is another matter. They do little more than let you sort

pictures and print out snapshots.

If your interest in photography is more than casual, you’ll want software that

lets you do everything formerly done in a darkroom—and a great deal more. Two new

programs, Photoshop Elements 2.0 from Adobe Systems (www.adobe.com) and PhotoImpact 8 from

Ulead Systems (www.ulead.com), offer such enhanced capabilities for less than $100. The

programs, while different in their approaches, are impressive. And they are striking

values in a software market where $500-plus packages such as Microsoft Office and

Adobe’s professional products are causing sticker shock.

Photoshop Elements, which comes in a single edition for Windows and Mac OS 9 or X, is a

refinement of the original program issued last year. Like its predecessor, the new

Elements can do at least 80% of what Photoshop 7.0 does at less than a quarter of the

price. Photoshop is the professional standard for photo editing, but most of its features

that are absent in Elements will never be missed by anyone except professional

photographers or, more likely, graphic artists or commercial Web masters. For example,

Elements lacks the ability to do precise color matching for four-color printing and does

not include the Image Ready application for advanced preparation of images for the Web.

On the other hand, Elements is a lot easier to use than the full Photoshop. It avoids

the restrictive approach of low-end products like Microsoft Picture It! Instead, it offers

liberal, and generally helpful, hints based on whatever task the program thinks you are

attempting. And it offers a number of what it calls "recipes"—tools to

combine and automate sequences of steps, such as creating a simple animated image for the

Web.

Ulead PhotoImpact ($79 as a download, $89 retail; Windows only) is closer in approach

and capabilities to full Photoshop than Elements. It offers a broad range of tools,

covering everything from simple red-eye correction to the preparation of complex images

for commercial printing or for the Web. But it generally offers much less guidance. Where

Elements includes a built-in tool for browsing and selecting the photos on your hard

drive, PhotoImpact relies on a separate application, Photo Explorer, that is only included

in the retail version. I also found the placement of tools and menu items in Elements much

more intuitive, but that may be the result of familiarity gained by having used Photoshop

and other Adobe programs for years.

PhotoImpact has some nifty tools for correcting these perspective errors. Select any

two points in a picture that are supposed to lie on a horizontal or vertical line, click,

and the picture is rotated to the correct orientation. Another tool lets you selectively

stretch the image to make those converging vertical lines parallel. And a single click

lets you crop the corrected picture back to a neat rectangle. Photoshop Elements can

accomplish the same effects, but not nearly as easily.

In the end, choosing between these programs is largely a matter of taste. PhotoImpact

offers a lot of raw power, but learning to use it effectively requires a fair investment

of time. Photoshop Elements offers fewer tricks but is a more polished and easier to use

package. Both are great values, and in a world of software monopolies, it’s wonderful

to have the choice.

By Stephen H Wildstrom

in BusinessWeek. Copyright 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc