Rating: Summary: Biggest Bang for the Buck Review: I really hate to spend a lot of money for anything and I shope around. I bought this product because I thought it had the best features for the price. I wanted to make sure it had a gif animator and it did. I will have to admit that this product is definitely not for novices and there is a learning curve. I would think this product is of professional grade. There are some great home edition products for novices like the photo editors that come bundled when you purchase a digital camera or when you buy digital prints on a CD, etc. We had a pile of pictures taken through the years of our children and I wanted to make a collage out of them. I scanned the pictures in and created a 20 X 30 collage out of them using this product. I uploaded the collage to Ofoto (Amazon's Photo site - the best I found!!) and had a 20 X 30 print made out of it. It came out just great!! If you're patient and willing to learn the concepts of this product than it is great and the sky is the limit of what you can do with it. You'll never use all features of this product. I am only giving it fours stars just to draw attention to my review to say that it is a complex product. I am sure that people who gave low marks really did not want to take the time to read the manual and/or understand the concepts.
Rating: Summary: Biggest Bang for the Buck Review: I really hate to spend a lot of money for anything and I shope around. I bought this product because I thought it had the best features for the price. I wanted to make sure it had a gif animator and it did. I will have to admit that this product is definitely not for novices and there is a learning curve. I would think this product is of professional grade. There are some great home edition products for novices like the photo editors that come bundled when you purchase a digital camera or when you buy digital prints on a CD, etc. We had a pile of pictures taken through the years of our children and I wanted to make a collage out of them. I scanned the pictures in and created a 20 X 30 collage out of them using this product. I uploaded the collage to Ofoto (Amazon's Photo site - the best I found!!) and had a 20 X 30 print made out of it. It came out just great!! If you're patient and willing to learn the concepts of this product than it is great and the sky is the limit of what you can do with it. You'll never use all features of this product. I am only giving it fours stars just to draw attention to my review to say that it is a complex product. I am sure that people who gave low marks really did not want to take the time to read the manual and/or understand the concepts.
Rating: Summary: Quick and dependable Review: I started out with V4.2, so I'm pretty used to navigating through the editing process quickly. I'm much faster with it than in Photoshop, BTW. Nothing much has changed, just some improvements with the web design part of it. I use it strictly for photography. It's fast, the undo arrow is right above your work and goes back I think 6-7 steps if you don't like what you did. It's a dependable, solid program that'll still be useful in years to come. Maybe Win XP has something to do with it, but I can't complain about XP either.
Rating: Summary: Not Bad Review: I still prefer my adobe photo shop for business which comes with my scanner even though I have upgraded my computer and OS several time. By the way, it is definitely better than Corel's product.
Rating: Summary: Great Product, so-so support Review: I think the program is great. I don't know much about graphics, but PhotoImpact is well-designed and -suited for web images (which is why I got this program.) I give Four Stars for a couple of reasons. I think the product itself deserves a five-star rating. Although the overall design is unconventional (if you are used to Microsoft Office's way of things), I like its uniqueness. I like its manual that it tells you how to customize (by setting preferences) the product to your own liking after a brief introduction in the first chapter. That's a sign of user-oriented design in my mind. You can tell that the product is web-oriented since there is a menu dedicated only for this purpose. (On the other hand, Paint Shop Pro 7 has this feature scattered around the program, it's difficult to find the quick'n'easy ways to manipulate graphics for the web.) I think the price is just right for what PhotoImpact is capable of. The program is intuitive enough, but you will get a lot better understanding if you dig through the features yourself with some help from Online Help. The negative factors are Ulead's support and the lack of available resources. While I was shopping around for a web graphics product, I contacted both Ulead and Jasc. Ulead took forever to answer my inquiries. The phone support is not toll-free. Although Ulead did eventually answer them, I am not confident that my technical issues will be answered promptly. I am guessing on this, but since PhotoImpact is probably not well-known as Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, the general resources, on the web, books, the newsgroup, are not as abundant as for other products. That's a shame, since I think PhotoImpact is better than either one. Despite those annoyances, if you are looking for a web graphics product with a different flavor, I highly recommend PhotoImpact 6.
Rating: Summary: Not beginner friendly Review: I was using Photodeluxe Buisness Edition and liked it but also wanted to try something else... Because Photoimpact had received such good reviews I bought it. It is far from user friendly/intuitive for the beginner. Don't waste your money! The manual isn't much help either. I'm going back to Adobe which I now really appreciate!
Rating: Summary: Great value - you get more than your money's worth Review: I wasn't planning on writing a review of this software, but I couldn't stand seeing it maligned by people incapable of using it. I find this tool extremely vaulable in creating graphics for my web pages. There is a learning curve if you've never used a Ulead product before, but graphics are graphics, and some skills can be carried over if you're used to using other graphic software. I've progressed from version 3.0 to 5.0 and now 6.0. and found each version much more versatile than the previous one. Sure, Photoshop (the full-blown version) may do some things better, but I don't care to drop a car payment on a piece of software that will be updated before I've gotten my money's worth out of it. PhotoImpact allows you to get professional graphics tools at a reasonable price. And.., you won't feel ripped-off if you decide to upgrade to the next version when it becomes available. A paintbrush is of no use to a plumber, so if you're satisfied with software labelled "deluxe" or "lite", then don't waste your money on this. If you're willing to take the time to learn how to do things for yourself (resist the manual if you can, hands on is always best), then give this a spin.
Rating: Summary: I love PhotoImpact! Review: I won't go into too much detail because the previous reviews said much of what I belive. I can say I have been using the PhotoImpact series for years and it is always easy and fun and produces good results. I perfer PhotoImpact to Photoshop. Soon PhotoImpact 7 will be out and I'll get that too. I started using the series with version 3 something that came with my scanner. I have been hooked ever since!
Rating: Summary: It's so good, I keep coming back to it... Review: I've been using ULead's PhotoImpact since I knew what FTP stood for ("File Transfer Protocol," and the year would be 1995), and despite my frequent attempts to get myself Adobe Photoshop-savvy, I keep coming back to PhotoImpact. It's not laziness or stubbornness that brings me back. Indeed, as a professional web developer who happens to have several personal/hobby sites as well, I know the "uber-app" for photo editing and graphics manipulation is and always will be Adobe Photoshop -- and it has a price point that proves it. However, everything I find myself doing on a day-to-day basis I can do quickly and easily in PhotoImpact, with results equal to or better than Photoshop. Why better? Because when I use PhotoImpact, I am not intimidated and frustrated trying to do a simple effect (like paint a 1 pixel black border around a digital photo -- something I can do in 1 step and 2 clicks in PhotoImpact), so that energy gets channeled into creativity and productivity. PhotoImpact is also just plain fun. When I'm in a creative slump, I look at the web site theme sets (bundled with the app, and others available as free downloads from ulead.com) for inspiration and a reminder that the web can be fun. Sometimes, a treatment in one of the theme sets will spark an idea; other times, an object they've created for royalty free use as a theme element will prove portable to my own web creations, with some tweaking. In short, I continue to rely on PhotoImpact for the majority of my digital photography and web graphics work, despite having access to Adobe Photoshop on my husband's computer. The fact that people can compare the two with a straight face indicates just how feature-rich and powerful PhotoImpact has become.
Rating: Summary: It's so good, I keep coming back to it... Review: I've been using ULead's PhotoImpact since I knew what FTP stood for ("File Transfer Protocol," and the year would be 1995), and despite my frequent attempts to get myself Adobe Photoshop-savvy, I keep coming back to PhotoImpact. It's not laziness or stubbornness that brings me back. Indeed, as a professional web developer who happens to have several personal/hobby sites as well, I know the "uber-app" for photo editing and graphics manipulation is and always will be Adobe Photoshop -- and it has a price point that proves it. However, everything I find myself doing on a day-to-day basis I can do quickly and easily in PhotoImpact, with results equal to or better than Photoshop. Why better? Because when I use PhotoImpact, I am not intimidated and frustrated trying to do a simple effect (like paint a 1 pixel black border around a digital photo -- something I can do in 1 step and 2 clicks in PhotoImpact), so that energy gets channeled into creativity and productivity. PhotoImpact is also just plain fun. When I'm in a creative slump, I look at the web site theme sets (bundled with the app, and others available as free downloads from ulead.com) for inspiration and a reminder that the web can be fun. Sometimes, a treatment in one of the theme sets will spark an idea; other times, an object they've created for royalty free use as a theme element will prove portable to my own web creations, with some tweaking. In short, I continue to rely on PhotoImpact for the majority of my digital photography and web graphics work, despite having access to Adobe Photoshop on my husband's computer. The fact that people can compare the two with a straight face indicates just how feature-rich and powerful PhotoImpact has become.
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