Recently, Ulead released its latest version of their popular image editing software: PhotoImpact 7. This review is to help you determine if it is worth your money to upgrade from a previous version or purchase the full version if you haven't yet bought PhotoImpact.

Overview
PhotoImpact is an image editing program that focuses on three key areas: Digital Photography, Graphic Design, and Web Graphics. Its greatest strength is that it is powerful enough to create quality images in each of those key areas while remaining simple enough to be useful to those who don't have a bachelors degree in Graphic Design. Also, at under $100, it is a tremendous value.

It is not meant to be more powerful than (or even equal to) Adobe's Photoshop (retail $609). If you have the skills and the need to be able to produce very complex images, Photoshop is still the professional standard. Also, PhotoImpact is not meant to create images for use in print work (other than digital photographs). However, if you want an inexpensive, relatively simple program for photo editing and creating web graphics, I think PhotoImpact is the best one out there.

Should You Upgrade?
Are you still using PhotoImpact version 5? I was too, for a long time. Even after we received it in the office, I hesitated to install version 6 because I didn't want to deal with learning the new version. If the version of PhotoImpact that you are currently using does what you need and you don't intend to get much more in depth with the tool, you probably won't benefit much by upgrading.

However, if you find that your graphic design abilities are improving the more you use PhotoImpact, then you probably would find benefit in the enhanced functionality and new tools found in PhotoImpact 7. Even Ulead's own marketing materials (included with the reviewers kit they provided me) don't begin to list all of the little details that have been improved in this new version. Here are just a few of the new features that I have found particularly helpful.

Path Panel - When you create an object with the shape tool, a new panel appears which gives you a lot better control over your objects. Determine the amount of curve on a Rounded Rectangle, set the outline to a mere hairline, define your shadow, apply 3-D effects and much more!

Object Align - Now, not only can you align objects to the left, right or center, you can "Space Evenly" among several objects. This will automatically take several objects (say buttons, for example) and space them out evenly so they have the same amount of space in between them.

Image Map Tool - This was one area that actually was better in PhotoImpact 5 than 6. However, the latest version is far superior. You can create image maps very simply now and copy/paste the output into EZ-PageBuilder.

Color Panel - In the past, you could only put 8 custom colors in the bar on the right of the image to refer back to. Now you can create a custom color pallet with as many colors as you would like, name them, then load/save the pallet as you wish. This is a tremendous improvement.

3-D Tools - Various new panel options and the "Z-Merge" tool allow you to work with 3-D and fuse them together like never before.

Enhanced Image Optimization - The image optimizer now supports JPEG 2000 for improved .jpg creation. Also, the mask tool is greatly improved as far as making transparent GIFs is concerned.

I could go on for days. The more I use PhotoImpact 7, the more impressed I become. They have improved so many aspects of the software that I can't begin to describe them all.

Conclusion
Creating graphics is not easy. If you've never done it before, you'll find that it requires you to develop a new skill-set that will take some time. However, Ulead's PhotoImpact 7 is one of the easier graphic editors that I have found. Even better, it is powerful enough that even professionals who know what they are doing (like Shay, one of our graphic gurus) can use it with great results. And all this comes at a great price. I have long been a supporter of PhotoImpact, and this latest version is by far their best yet. If you have a prior version and would benefit from the enhanced functionality of PhotoImpact 7, it is definitely worth upgrading to the latest version. If you do not currently own a graphic editor and are in the market for a single tool to create web graphics or manipulate photos, this is an excellent example.

An Installation Warning
As part of my test I installed PhotoImpact 7 on a Windows XP machine, and it went off without a hitch. The software fully supports the latest Microsoft operating system and works beautifully with it. When I installed it on my Windows 98 machine, however, I ran into serious problems. Over the next few days the system became unstable and I was unable to work in PhotoImpact. Finally I found a 9MB patch on the Ulead website. Since I downloaded and installed the patch, PhotoImpact 7 has performed perfectly. I highly recommend downloading the patch from their site before installing version 7 on Windows 98 machines and running the patch immediately after installing the program.