Photo Explosion

Rating:
Summary: A whole lot of fun.
Review: I disagree with other reviews. Up until recently, I was using a computer with, believe it or not, Windows 95. With only 32MB ram. I had a need to be able to do image editing, and this program has much, much less of an intimidation factor. Once a person learns the "SmartSelect" function, they can cut out very clean, very neat images, transform them into "objects", and merge elements from other photos. Once a person gets the "hang" of using the various effects and selection tools, no one will even know you're not using Photoshop Elements. The best thing, the absolute best quality to this program is adding text, it makes it one of the easiest things to do, move it around, add shadows, color gradients, textures, etc, etc. It isn't for very, very serious artists, but for the average person or even a person who merely likes to play with their photos and share them, this is a absolute blast. Every picture I do is great fun, and never looks sloppy.

Rating:
Summary: Theres better out there
Review: I got this with high hopes and...well, I think I set my hopes too high. Maybe I expected too much.

I have only been getting into digital image editing in the past two years and this was the place I had picked to start from. I have a digital camera and scanner and use them both to get images to my computer and had hoped that this software would give me a great deal of choices in dealing with those images. Not so.

For one, the cloning tool is incredibly difficult to use. It is not intuitive (nothing in this program is) and often you have a hard time understanding where you are cloning from. The menu buttons with this tool, as with others, are set so far out of the way that they are not easily found (bottom left corner whereas the tool options are in the top left- also that button is very much the same color as the background, making it difficult to spot). I do a great deal of air-brush type effects in my pictures and it took me 1.5 hours to brush out one thing in a picture with this software. In comparision I used a different program (PSP7) to do something similar in ten minutes.

The rest of the options are equally as riddled with problems. Some of the filters and things that can be applied to the picture don't seem to work as well as other programs I have seen. The standard effects often come out buggy or misapplied. I have seen the Sepia filter skew an image a few times, for instance. The Dell imaging suite offers more choices and better results in that area. The warp tool is rigid and there is no chance of doing anything artistic or comical with it (no oversizing mouths like caricutures here).

The overlay function is either a)non-existant or b)so hard to find that I just didn't see it. I was trying to meld two pictures together and could get no results with either trimming the photo to try and fit or making it transparent to set it over the other.

It does capture images well though. It fixes red-eye nicely too.

For those who do not need a high-powered tool, this is perhaps your best bet. For those who want something that will allow them freedom to do with their photos as they wish, I would suggest something more powerful. The up in price is worth it.

Rating:
Summary: Great results for novice users
Review: Photo Explosion is a very easy to use, yet powerful, photo editing program. I use this program more than any of my higher cost photo editing software. It's easy to change the intensity, tone and color saturation of your digital pictures as well as apply a wide variety of fades to the edges of your pictures.

I've had several people comment that pictures that were edited with this program look better than photos that they had taken at professional studios.