With sales of digital cameras having overtaken conventional models, deciding what to do with your pictures is more difficult than ever. Picking out the best ones and sticking them in your photo album is still an option, but digital-image editing software provides the opportunity to be a lot more creative with your photos. But what should you look for in a digital darkroom?

Do You Need Home-user or Professional Software?

What Do You Need? Broadly speaking, software is aimed at one of two types of user: the professional, who needs to get images into the best shape for reproduction--be it in a glossy magazine or on the Web--and the home user, mainly interested in getting the most out of their photographic endeavours and having some fun. While professional packages offer unmatched control and editing power, they come with a steep learning-curve attached. Unless you have demanding image-editing requirements, are thinking of taking up a career in image editing or are simply blighted with insatiable curiosity you're probably better off, initially at least, with software aimed at the non-pro user. Home digital darkrooms are often just as powerful in what they can achieve, but the tools are packaged to make them more accessible to novice users. In addition to retouching and image enhancement, nearly all of them offer a selection of projects--these will include multiple-image montage tricks, special effects and template-based projects for cards, calendars, invitations and so on. If you take a lot of pictures you'll need to consider what facilities a package offers for organising and cataloguing your photos; likewise, if you want to share your photos on the Web or send them via e-mail, you may want a pro package.

Professional Users

PaintShop Pro JASC's Paint Shop Pro 8 is a very popular program with amateurs who are serious about image editing because it provides the power and control of applications like Photoshop, but is more reasonably priced. Paint Shop Pro has plenty of top-end features like layer control, transparency, masking, vector paths and adjustment layers. Another big plus is that it's compatible with Photoshop's plug-in architecture, so most of the plug-in fliters that work with Photoshop will also work with Paint Shop Pro. Paintshop Pro comes with an excellent application for creating .gif animations. Animation Shop 3 includes a banner wizard and some excellent transitions to give your .gifs a lift.

Photoshop The mother of all image-editing programs, Adobe Photoshop (in Mac and PC versions) is used by professionals the world over. What the pros like about Photoshop is its power and flexibility. Version 8 is a major upgrade. Adobe has substantially revised the interface: access to tool options is more direct and the Layers palette has been reorganised to make it easier to cope with multi-layered images. There are cracking new power features like vector editing and masking-layer styles; typographic tools have also been radically improved. Although a professional tool, Photoshop isn't beyond the reach of those who take pictures for pleasure. Keen software-savvy photographers will find the results more than justify the effort.

PhotoImpact Ulead PhotoImpact 8 will appeal to anyone who is used to the MS-Office way of doing things and has neither the time nor inclination to get to grips with a new and unfamiliar interface. The PhotoImpact interface has changed little since version 4.2. It has a standard menu bar which runs along the top of the editing window and a simple selection of tools arranged down the side. The easyPalette provides direct access to everything from special-effects filters to picture frames and painting tools, and also doubles up as an object layer manager, which keeps the screen free of clutter. PhotoImpact has a good range of Web tools including an image slicer and JavaScript rollover assistant. Version 8 takes the Web features a step further with the ability to export an entire HTML page, rather than just component graphics.

Home Users

PhotoShop Elements PhotoShop Elements 2 is not a "lite" version of PhotoShop, like the LE edition. It is actually a fully-featured program offering most of the functionality of Photoshop, the notable exclusion being CMKY colour separation, for professional printing. Much lower priced than PhotoShop, but with more functionality than LE, it offers top-quality photo-editing and manipulation facilities that are hard to beat.

Photo Standard 9.0 2004 Photo Standard 9.0 2004's interface is its strongest point. Workbench and project tabs to the left of the editing window, a layer manager to the right and a filmstrip along the bottom provides a holding place for all of your images. Workbench projects include cut-outs, touch-up, paint, colour and edge effects, and the Minilab offers a fast route to retouching and image enhancing.

PhotoSuite 5 If you're at home with Internet Explorer, then using PhotoSuite 5 should be second nature. This image editor is actually based on Microsoft's Web browser. PhotoSuite has one or two original features. Rather than expecting you to know what to do with your digital photos, PhotoSuite 5 groups its tools into the main steps of capturing images, editing them, outputting photos and organising them into albums. In each of these sections you get the tools you'd expect, presented simply but with some powerful options. The red eye remover and scratch fixer are simple to use but they fix the problems without distorting the colours in the rest of the image. If you're working with several photos that you took at the same time, they tend to have similar problems: multiple photo enhance lets you apply the same changes and effects to several photos at once.

Photo Express Strong on organising and sorting pictures within albums, Photo Express 4 also has the ability to print multiple images on a single page. Other features include batch processing, 3-D text effects, themed templates and animated effects. Options for sharing your photos include HTML e-mails and facilities for easy upload to Kodak PhotoNet and iMira.com, in addition to Web album and slide-show features. You also get the excellent Cool360 application for producing 360-degree panoramas.

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