PhotoImpact

   I'm going to be candid here. We've been using Adobe PhotoShop so long that we sometimes forget there are other excellent programs out there which can often do more for you in many areas. One of those programs is ULead's PhotoImpact.
   Of course, the most difficult thing in the world (I've said this for more than a dozen years) is to review a product which competes with one you have been using for a long time. You get "used" to what something does and want the new product to do the same things in the same way, but do them better. This is usually unfair to the new program and is one of the main bones of contention between word processing giants Microsoft and Corel (which now owns Word Perfect).
   Given all of that, I am here to tell you that PhotoImpact is a boon to web design. It does the vast majority of the things PhotoShop does and it does them well. Indeed, it does a lot of things in its basic configuration which requires plugins for PhotoShop (ULead, for that matter, sells PhotoShop plugins, too).
   But where PhotoImpact really turns heads is what it can do for you if you are creating graphics for the web! It has a set of tools that let you get really creative, rather than going searching for "just the right thing" for your web page. We'll get to some of those in a minute.

   To your left is something I truly love about this program. This is a screen capture of the Partition Magic interface (in the two boxes, enlarged to see the difference between the two) which is being run through PhotoImpact's JPEG "Smart Saver."
   (The screen capture, incidentally, was done with PhotoImpact, too!)
   PhotoImpact is telling us we can reduce the file size of a 307k graphic to 28k and still retain all the quality necessary to see it on the web. That is less than 10 percent of the original file size. It makes people who surf our pages happy and it keeps down the size of the files we have to upload and store with our ISP.

There is also a GIF "Smart Saver" which works, essentially, the same way. It gives color reduction options as well.
   Well, cool. But there is more. Much more.
   PhotoImpact boasts a background designer, button designer, frame designer and an HTML image assistant, all designed to help you do neat, interesting and creative things with your web pages.
   The background designer lets you set up a background of your choosing, with so many options you can spend a lot of time just playing happily. The backgrounds which it designs, however, tile seemlessly with one another so the result is, of course, you have a small file doing a big job. Even if you don't want to do a background on the web, you can use this same program feature for your Windows wallpaper design.
   Button designer is the neatest of these features, however. Think of almost any sort of effect you might want to use on a button – including 3D – and button designer will make it for you. Again, you can have a lot of fun just fooling around with this part of the program. And the results are quite outstanding.
   Frame designer (surprise!) creates 3D frames. The options are relatively endless. You can really spiff up your web pages (or, for that matter, other designs) with this feature.
   The HTML assistant is an interesting addition to a graphics program. It lets you specify text colors and image attributes for objects and then produces the correct HTML code, all ready to be imported into your HTML editor.
   All in all, PhotoImpact brings some excellent new ideas to the area of graphic design programs. At the same time, it provides the functionality of the top level graphics programs, which makes it an outstanding package and a fine value.

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