VERDICT: A wide range of power, but too old-fashioned and confusing for most users.

Ulead (since taken over by Corel) PhotoImpact was the first major bitmap editor to recognise the need to focus on digital camera owners.

In fact the Album module it pioneered is still included with PhotoImpact, but it hasn’t been seriously developed for years – these days you are expected to manage your photos with the bundled version of PhotoExplorer 8.6.
This proves a mixed blessing. Photo Explorer offers plenty of power - such as multimedia and ZIP support – but its on-the-fly folder-based approach is distinctly old-fashioned. In fact if you dig deep enough you’ll discover that Photo Explorer also offers the ability to create a combined album displaying all the photos in specified folders and even offers a calendar-based view of this. It should be the best of both worlds but, in practice, Photo Explorer’s album handling strains at the seams to manage thousands of images and the lack of any tagging capabilities, beyond applying captions and ratings, is a major drawback. To top it all, the Photo Explorer interface is just too old-fashioned and ugly for users to want to spend any serious time with.

The new ExpressFix workspace is an attempt to make PhotoImpact 12 more user-friendly

In terms of editing, Photo Explorer offers red eye and distortion removal filters, some basic one-click automatic fixes and a dedicated 9-step wizard designed to walk you through basic image enhancement. Much more power is available on opening the image into the main PhotoImpact program which offers dozens of adjustment and photographic filters as well as plenty of retouching tools.
The downside is that the PhotoImpact interface and its range of options are confusing - and more-often-than not the filter dialogs are too. Ulead has recognized as much and in this latest release has added a dedicated Express Fix workspace complete with full-screen central preview alongside commands for correcting exposure, colour, saturation, focus and skin quality. Unfortunately the workspace doesn’t offer any hands-on tools and the preview thumbnails are too small to be useful. Where PhotoImpact’s visual, preview-based approach does score is in terms of creative power and, using the thumbnail-based EasyPalette, you can enjoyably explore and apply hundreds of effects.
You can also create photo-based projects, including cards, CD covers and calendars, based on supplied samples ready for print or email. Further sharing options are available back in Photo Explorer. You can create slideshows by dragging images to a dedicated palette, set up a default transition and then burn the results for VCD playback or export to MPEG or AVI. Finally you can output images to simple thumbnail or slideshow-based web galleries but you’ll have to find your own hosting solution.
PhotoImpact was once the best PC Photography package available but it now looks dated and confusing compared to today’s more streamlined solutions.

EASE OF USE 3/6
FEATURES 4/6
VALUE FOR MONEY 3/6
OVERALL 3/6