
You can tweak the eye color, size, glint, and even species (yes, you can remove the red from your dog’s eyes).
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Instead of simply stamping a black dot over the retina or desaturating the red like most other image editors do, Paint Shop Pro actually stamps a customizable replacement eye in its place. Without a doubt, Paint Shop Pro stands head and shoulders above the competition for red-eye removal.

Red-eye removal, on the other hand, was particularly easy with several applications. But virtually all of its photo editing tools are underpowered or poorly implemented. SmartDraw Photo tries to be a jack-of-all-trades for novices, offering photo organizing and Web publishing tools, among other things. And while CorelDraw Essentials promises “powerful photo-retouching tools,” they proved too weak for our project. Print Shop Pro 20–descended from a venerable DOS program used to make dot matrix banners for high school cafeterias back in 1984–is still intended primarily for making posters, greeting cards, calendars, and the like it lacks many common image editing features. Some contenders were way out of their league: CorelDraw Essentials 2, SmartDraw Photo 2, and Broderbund’s The Print Shop Pro Publisher Deluxe 20 simply lack necessary tools.
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Nevertheless, advanced users will feel stifled by its wizard-based editing tools and its lack of manual adjustments. Because it offers only a few task icons and edit categories, we didn’t think it would get anywhere near completing our test composite, but it surprised us by finishing almost every step of the process. Farther from our ideal, but excellent for beginners, is Roxio’s deceptively simple-looking PhotoSuite 5 Platinum Edition. Don’t bother with the online help–it’s the worst we’ve seen, with no context-sensitive assistance and only a 1995-era help menu. Overall, however, Adobe doesn’t provide enough of these recipes.ĪrcSoft PhotoStudio 5.5 offers some capable tools, but it lacks key features. We found that its easy-to-follow tutorials, called recipes, helped us accomplish most of our tasks without checking the user guide or online help. Of these three, Photoshop Elements is the most daunting for photo editing beginners to learn. If you don’t need those extras, you’ll likely prefer the less cluttered interface of Paint Shop Pro 8, Digital Image Pro 9, or Adobe Photoshop Elements 2. Ulead PhotoImpact 8 was also a good editor, but its interface is sometimes confusing–its content creation and Web publishing features, while thorough, take up valuable space in the menus, where we’d rather see more photo editing options. Unfortunately, that same task pane can begin to feel confining once you’ve earned your image editing stripes. Microsoft Digital Image Pro 9 also proved to be very strong, with a task pane particularly well suited for beginners. Plus, many of its tools are easier to master than are their Photoshop equivalents.
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We ended up picking Paint Shop Pro 8 as our Best Buy because it easily juggled multiple layers and offered the most flexible tool set, free from the restrictions of wizards. So for basic tweaks like those under Task 1 in the table, we might pass up Photoshop for a simpler program. Though Photoshop Creative Suite is truly the most powerful image editor of the bunch (no surprise there, considering it costs a defibrillating $649), we discovered that some programs, including Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 and Microsoft Digital Image Pro 9, are more user-friendly. But this second image is also underexposed, and the view out the window looks a bit dull, so we’d like to insert a digital photo of a blue sky.

Our goal? Clean it up, knock out the background, and move our speaker and podium to a more attractive background scene that we shot with a digital camera. And we scanned it with a really dusty scanner, to boot. The photo looks bad–it’s underexposed, it suffers from unsightly red-eye, and the contrast is low. Our tests began with a 35mm photograph of a speaker at a podium in a convention hall. We put nine of these programs through their paces to see which have the power to improve on Mother Nature’s shortcomings–and which suck more wind than you will while huffing up Half Dome.

You don’t have to spend a fortune to get them–many photo editing packages cost less than $100. But to get the best results from your photos, you need powerful image editing tools at your fingertips.

These days, with a laptop in your rucksack, you can carry a digital darkroom all over Yosemite. Ansel Adams had just a camera, a chemical darkroom, and his fertile imagination to create his photographic masterpieces.
