Photosuite

When it comes to feature set and user friendliness, PhotoSuite easily measures up to PhotoDeluxe. It offers an extensive array of tools that you'll love if you want to edit images and organize files but need only rudimentary Web graphics tools. There's a lot to like here; too bad the interface is hard to read and the help is so meager. For beginners, PhotoSuite is more difficult to master than Picture It.

Help-Less Interface
PhotoSuite's central work area is flanked on the left by an Activity panel that displays step-by-step instructions associated with whatever task you select. A library of open projects, photos, albums, and slide shows sits on the right. You can access the major program functions--Get, Compose, Organize, Share, Print, and Browse--from a button bar atop the work area, and a panel of icons next to the Activity panel displays tools for editing and viewing your project. However, PhotoSuite is much harder to use than it should be. The program lacks the volume of ubiquitous help and tips that Picture It offers, and you can't access context menus via a right-click. Although the predesigned projects and templates are very attractive, PhotoSuite doesn't offer nearly as many as Picture It does.

Image-Editing Tools Not for Newbies
Beginners will be totally baffled by PhotoSuite's Prepare Photo window, which offers no clues as to how to use it, and many other simple processes are far more convoluted than necessary. For example, to crop a picture, instead of accessing a crop or clip tool, you must select Prepare • Activity Panel • Select • Crop. Sound convoluted? It is. Another strange note: The program can use Photoshop plug-ins, but folks who use Photoshop would hardly be in the market for an intro-level image editor.

Extra Goodies and a Few Baddies
PhotoSuite has a few impressive extras, including a panoramic stitching function that lets you knit sequential images together to create a 360-degree view. This year, many low-end editors include a function that lets you swap pictures of heads onto different bodies; PhotoSuite offers a wide collection of body parts, if you're into that sort of thing.

Overall, however, PhotoSuite has too many irritants to be one of our favorites. You can't use the mouse wheel for scrolling, the manual is superthin, and the help files are inadequate and confusing. Also, while it's possible to create simple Web pages that include sound and animation, you have to add navigation links by hand.

Although the program has some interesting frills (such as the body swap feature), we wish it offered more automatic enhancements and guided activities for beginners. PhotoSuite's editing tools and output quality don't measure up to either Picture It's or Canon Photo's. Still, you might enjoy what PhotoSuite has to offer, if you're willing to take the extra time to learn your way around. If not, Picture It is a better investment.

Usually bundled with PCs, scanners and digital cameras, MGI Photosuite has built up a reputation over the years for being an adequate image-editing solution, aimed mainly at the hobbyist and home digital camera user. Version 4 builds on this reputation, providing a range of new Web features along with some enhancements to the general toolset.

Photosuite 4 is divided into six rooms immediately accessible from the start-up screen. The Get room is simply for bringing your images into Photosuite, be it from a digital camera, scanner, the Internet or from your computer's hard disk. Once the image is in the application jumps to the Prepare room. In Prepare mode, you are presented with menus enabling you to enhance your photos in many different ways. But unfortunately Photosuite is not quite as intuitive as you might hope.

In a wizard-based workflow, the app takes you through many a clunky dialog in order to achieve the desired effect. Take for example the Touchup tool. On clicking on the Touchup button another menu appears, giving you the opportunity to do one of many things such as Remove Red Eye, Remove Wrinkles, as well as other more conventional adjustments. On activating any one of these tools, a numbered list appears adivising you what to do, which is great for beginners, but for those of us with a little more creative knowledge it gives the distinct feeling that you never have any real control.

The Compose room is the place where you can bring in your enhanced images and create a composition. You can now use layers (called Object Stacks) along with dropshadows and bevels to create some rather interesting compositions, and surprisingly this is rather easy to use. Version 4 also includes opacity settings, adding to the application's now improved compositing tools.

The key feature of this release is Web integration. From within the program, you can design, edit and publish your own Web page, adjusting image sizes and types to suit. You can plug in sounds as well, and generally play around to your heart's content. You're likely to produce something 'lively' rather than particularly professional, but at least the results can be used as an online photo album, so you can bore/ entertain friends on the other side of the world (or the other side of the room) with your holiday 'slides'.

Then there are the clever tricks, such as the photo-tapestry, which allows you to break down a photo of your choice into a mosaic of other, smaller photos. The results are very impressive, and it's loads of fun. You can make screen-savers from your photos, too, and apply all sorts of distorting effects to your pictures, before printing them or e-mailing them to unsuspecting friends and relatives.

This is not a piece of software for the professional user. Although it has some impressive effects filters, the interface is far too 'family' oriented for that, and the supported file formats aren't comprehensive. But this is an advantage, not a disadvantage, as PhotoSuite 4 places some powerful tools at the hands of the relative novice, conveniently hiding the more complex components out of harm's way. Both the interface and the tools available are well suited to the consumer, for whom this is a comprehensive piece of image editing software.

PhotoSuite Tutorials and Support