Photo Finishers

Ansel Adams had just a camera, a chemical darkroom, and his fertile imagination to create his photographic masterpieces. These days, with a laptop in your rucksack, you can carry a digital darkroom all over Yosemite. But to get the best results from your photos, you need powerful image editing tools at your fingertips. You don’t have to spend a fortune to get them–many photo editing packages cost less than $100. 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.

Our tests began with a 35mm photograph of a speaker at a podium in a convention hall. The photo looks bad–it’s underexposed, it suffers from unsightly red-eye, and the contrast is low. And we scanned it with a really dusty scanner, to boot. 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. 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.

After accomplishing these steps, we still want to adjust the foreground and background images independently; to manage this easily, we need each image to reside in its own layer. And last, we want to add a snappy title to the piece and crop the final, composited image to make an 8-by-10-inch print.

So which of these nine programs can do every one of these things, and perhaps even approach the power of our benchmark, the professional-level Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite? Read on.

The Powerful and the Pitiful

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. So for basic tweaks like those under Task 1 in the table, we might pass up Photoshop for a simpler program. 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. Plus, many of its tools are easier to master than are their Photoshop equivalents.

Microsoft Digital Image Pro 9 also proved to be very strong, with a task pane particularly well suited for beginners. Unfortunately, that same task pane can begin to feel confining once you’ve earned your image editing stripes. 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. 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. Of these three, Photoshop Elements is the most daunting for photo editing beginners to learn. 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. Overall, however, Adobe doesn’t provide enough of these recipes.

ArcSoft PhotoStudio 5.5 offers some capable tools, but it lacks key features. 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. Farther from our ideal, but excellent for beginners, is Roxio’s deceptively simple-looking PhotoSuite 5 Platinum Edition. 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. Nevertheless, advanced users will feel stifled by its wizard-based editing tools and its lack of manual adjustments.

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. 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. And while CorelDraw Essentials promises “powerful photo-retouching tools,” they proved too weak for our project. SmartDraw Photo tries to be a jack-of-all-trades for novices, offering photo organizing and Web publishing tools, among other things. But virtually all of its photo editing tools are underpowered or poorly implemented.

The top challenger to Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite comes down to Adobe Photoshop Elements 2, Ulead PhotoImpact 8, or Jasc Paint Shop Pro 9. The right one for you depends largely on your comfort level with image editing conventions. You’ll need lots of experience with Photoshop-like tools to get the most from PhotoImpact or Photoshop Elements; PhotoImpact offers the most bang for the buck if you’re also interested in Web design. Paint Shop Pro presents a somewhat friendlier interface–and as you become more familiar with image editing, you can delve deeper into its tools.

Task 1: Cosmetic Touch-Up

When you have a picture in dire need of help, the smartest place to start is to get rid of all the dust. Only Adobe Photoshop Elements managed to replicate Photoshop CS’s effective dust removal. Paint Shop Pro and Digital Image Pro did a passable job, but several others were ineffective or clumsy. Print Shop Pro 20 and PhotoImpact, for example, left us with the unenviable task of using the clone brush to stamp out dust one speck at a time. Arcsoft PhotoStudio’s default setting blurred our image into an impressionistic mess and required us to make manual adjustments. Photoshop Elements’s default setting did a much better job without causing undue blurring.

Red-eye removal, on the other hand, was particularly easy with several applications. Without a doubt, Paint Shop Pro stands head and shoulders above the competition for red-eye removal. 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. You can tweak the eye color, size, glint, and even species (yes, you can remove the red from your dog’s eyes). On the other hand, SmartDraw Photo distinguished itself as uniquely bad here, with only three preset sizes and no transparency adjustment. Its tool placed a pure-black cross in the iris, which made our subject look like an evil lizard alien, announcing her plans to conquer Earth from some hotel in Indiana.

If your photo has bigger blemishes than dust motes, you’ll need a program with cloning and/or healing tools, so you can copy adjacent, clean parts of the image over the imperfections. We had two primary targets set in our sights for the cloning and healing tools–the long hair that runs over our subject’s face, and the microphone stand that obscures her left arm. Both had to go before we could isolate her from the background.

For these tasks, Microsoft Digital Image Pro was our hands-down favorite. Most programs required us to carefully dab over the microphone stand with their clone brushes; but using Digital Image Pro’s Smart Erase tool, we simply outlined the object, and the program automatically erased it–with very believable results. The program also contains a traditional cloning tool, which we used to clean up a few leftover artifacts.

CorelDraw’s clone brush is virtually unusable, and SmartDraw doesn’t have a dedicated clone brush at all–instead, we used its multipurpose touch-up tool, but it was unable to remove either the hair or the microphone stand in our example photo without leaving visible smears and artifacts. And the clone brush in Print Shop Pro 20 offers a mere six sizes, with no way to fine-tune its operation, causing us to massacre the woman’s face while trying to remove the hair over her cheek.

The Triple Bypass

Now we were ready to perform some major surgery: to separate our subject and podium from the background. This was a real challenge because the image’s low contrast made it hard for the programs to find the boundary between the foreground and the background. Don’t get us started on her hair–we had to guess where her ‘do ends and the nearly identical background begins. Knocking out the background was easiest in programs like Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro, both of which have Photoshop-style background erasers. As with a traditional eraser tool, you drag a background eraser around your image, but you don’t have to be exact–a background eraser can discern color changes and the edges of your subject in order to remove the background intelligently. Even so, to trace an outline of the woman’s hair we had to resort to a Smart Edge tool in Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop Elements (where it’s called a Magnetic Lasso). This tool automatically snaps a selection onto high-contrast boundaries near the cursor as you move around the image, which is much easier than trying to trace an object by hand.

Paint Shop Pro comes out on top for having a smoother, less “twitchy” background eraser than the one in Photoshop Elements, which lagged behind our mouse movements and sometimes overshot the edge, erasing more than we intended. PhotoImpact was a great runner-up–it lacks a background eraser, but its magnetic lasso tool tracked edges superbly, and it includes a Bezier curve-style keypoint system that lets you adjust a selection after you’ve made it. In most apps, once you select a boundary, it’s set in stone. CorelDraw’s image editor, Corel Photobook, doesn’t have a magnetic lasso tool. We resorted to using its freehand lasso tool and automask function, but the tool didn’t accurately select our dimly lit subject.

Before pasting the foreground image onto the new background, we needed to feather the edge of our speaker to create the illusion of space between her and the background. Most of the programs support edge feathering (though Print Shop Pro 20 allows no feathering of any kind). ArcSoft PhotoStudio produced the least impressive results, and we could apply its “soft edges” function only after adding the foreground as a new layer in a new composition. The blurred edges looked clearly artificial, as if the speaker were pasted on. Likewise, without feathering, the foreground in Print Shop Pro 20 resembled one of those magnetic Colorform stickers you might have played with as a kid, standing out in sharp contrast to the background.

Task 2: Quick Fixes

The new background needed some work as well. Thankfully, making adjustments to brightness, contrast, and color saturation was a snap with almost all the programs. We particularly appreciated the Quick Fix option in Photoshop Elements and–even more–the One Step Photo Fix in Paint Shop Pro. Elements’s Quick Fix requires a separate step for each adjustment (such as focus and color), while One Step Photo Fix runs an entire script of fixes. We didn’t have to make each adjustment manually in Paint Shop Pro: Its auto fixes were spot-on. In contrast, Roxio’s PhotoDoctor wizard produced disastrous results, dramatically overexposing our image, though we were able to use its manual sliders to make things look right.

For the most precise control over color and lighting, we prefer to work with a Photoshop-like level control, which lets you set the exposure in highlights and shadows by manipulating the x-axis of a histogram. The histogram is a graph that shows the quantity of information stored in each color channel in your image. In plain English, it shows how many pixels are dark and light–the darkest to the left, and the lightest to the right. Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, Digital Image Pro, and PhotoImpact all include levels controls, but PhotoImpact had other handy manual controls as well, like a tone map (which helps redistribute colors to fix imbalances or remove unwanted shadows) and separate histograms for highlights, shadows, and midtones (for very precise contrast control).

The entire image seemed slightly askew, so we wanted to rotate it a little bit as well. Print Shop Pro 20 made this cumbersome: its photo editor rotates an image only in 90-degree increments. For incremental rotations, you have to import the image into a project. Several programs (like PhotoSuite, Paint Shop Pro, and Digital Image Pro) permitted us to straighten the image just by aligning an on-screen rule. ArcSoft PhotoStudio failed to include a straightening ruler, and it wouldn’t let us rotate by fractions of degrees–whole numbers only. To straighten an image, it often takes just a very small adjustment to make a picture look perfectly true.

Task 3: Laying It On

Support for layers is essential for an advanced image editor, because they let you edit different parts of a picture independently. We wanted to create three layers in this project: the speaker at the podium, the room with the windows, and the sky in back. With layers, you can adjust the colors in these images separately, resize them, and then merge them together into a single image.

Layers clearly separated the better image editors from the pretenders. SmartDraw Photo has no layer support at all; we had to select the speaker and podium, and then copy and paste the selection into the background image (the room with the windows). This work-around was problematic: SmartDraw merged the images, so we couldn’t edit the components separately. Roxio PhotoSuite 5’s selection tools were limited: While adjusting one “cutout” (layer), we could not hide the others. That made it difficult to gauge our edits and also created a strange ghosting effect on the selected area.

Working with layers in Corel Photobook felt counterintuitive, and features were hard to find. Like PhotoSuite, it has limited selection tools. Using layers in Print Shop Pro 20 required a lot of back-and-forth because its image editor doesn’t support layers. We had to use Print Shop’s graphics program and import our images into a photo collage project, a cumbersome process. Neither Print Shop Pro 20 nor Corel Photobook offered an eraser to help us get rid of the background, so we had to draw a freehand crop around our subject in order to do so. Even then, when we imported the cropped image into our project in Print Shop Pro 20, the erased background wasn’t transparent, but opaque white.

To vary a layer’s opacity in Jasc Paint Shop Pro, you have to open a dialog box, while Photoshop Elements and PhotoImpact provide a layers palette with a slide bar in the header. You see the opacity changing on your image, not in a dialog box.

To replace the overcast sky in the windows, we used the magic wand tool to select the sky in each of the window panes, varying the tolerance to avoid including any of the ground in the lower part of the frame. Then we punched out the sky using the delete key and added the new sky image as a layer behind them so it would show through the transparent areas we created. Though difficult in Roxio PhotoSuite 5, it was easy with Photoshop Elements. Finally, we added the podium from the first image as a layer in front of the room.

At this point, our composition was nearly complete. We wanted to select our subject’s face and brighten it a bit. But manually correcting the color in an image like that of our speaker can be difficult and time-consuming; you often need to move the sliders for red, green, and blue in small increments, eyeballing the results. That’s why we appreciate programs with good, one-click automatic color correction like Paint Shop Pro, PhotoImpact, Photoshop Elements, and Digital Image Pro.

Similarly, a variations tool is handy: Photoshop Elements, PhotoImpact, and CorelDraw show your image in various iterations, each with a slightly different color cast. Also, PhotoImpact and Photoshop Elements show proposed color adjustment in the actual image window, while CorelDraw shows them only in a tiny preview window.

Sharpening the foreground and blurring the background were both simple in the compositions built on layers, since adjustments to one layer don’t affect the other. Print Shop Pro 20 required opening a fixed-size dialog box to perform this task.

All of these applications have fairly powerful text tools for adding a caption. In most cases you just select the text tool, pick a font and size, and start typing. And while it’s not a big deal, we were disappointed whenever we had to enter our text into a dialog box, as you must with Paint Shop Pro, PhotoSuite, and SmartDraw, instead of typing directly onto the image. The dialog box complicated our task of positioning, sizing, and editing the text, since we couldn’t see what the results would look like as we typed and manipulated the text.

A Final Step

The last step of our project was to crop the completed image so it would fit in an 8-by-10-inch print. The better applications let you choose specific dimensions, like 8-by-10 or 5-by-7, from a menu, and then resize the crop box while it keeps the correct proportions. That way, you know exactly what’s going to come out of your printer. Most of the programs had great cropping tools with easy-to-pick presets for common print sizes, though PhotoStudio and SmartDraw Photo didn’t.

PhotoStudio gives its crop dimensions in pixels, so it’s impossible to size your crop for a 5-by-7-inch print. Similarly, you can drag SmartDraw Photo’s crop box wherever you want, but there’s no dialog box to set fixed dimensions. Corel Photobook is sheer frustration: It crops the image the instant you draw a crop box, with no opportunity to resize or reproportion the image. You can’t even do that with Print Shop Pro 20–it only crops individual images, not multilayered compositions.

Best Buy: Power and Ease

Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 is easy to learn and puts a lot of photo editing brawn at your fingertips. Highlights include customizable red-eye removal and an accurate background eraser tool. The program easily juggles multiple layers, and it offers flexible tools that enable you to grow with the program instead of forcing you to work in accordance with rigid wizards. To save time, you can use One Step Photo Fix to make multiple adjustments simultaneously–and this hit the bull’s eye on our test shots.

Features Comparison: Affordable Photo Editors (chart)

TASK 1: Fix exposure and delete background

A powerful photo editing program can help you create stunning compositions–but some are clearly for beginners only.

TASK 2: Enhance new background (chart)

A powerful photo editing program can help you create stunning compositions–but some are clearly for beginners only.

TASK 3: Combine images (chart)

A powerful photo editing program can help you create stunning compositions–but some are clearly for beginners only.

Photo Organizers: Can They Edit?

Many photo organizers come with image editing tools, but can you really forgo a dedicated editing program? We tried editing with four programs: Adobe Photoshop Album 2, ACDSee 6, Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album 4, and Picasa 1.5. We didn’t attempt to evaluate their image management capabilities, only their image editing features. ACDSee and Jasc stood out.

ACDSee 6 shows a lot of editing brawn for an organizer. It was the only program to offer a noise-reduction tool (which we used to eliminate virtually all of the dust in our foreground image), and its red-eye remover is the best of the four–it lets you choose which eye color to use when eliminating the red. It also has a surprisingly powerful set of color and brightness controls, including a true histogram-based levels tool.

Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album 4 is the only organizer with a variety of selection tools, though it doesn’t have any kind of magnetic lasso tool or edge-feathering capability. Jasc delivers a one-step Quick Fix tool for color and brightness, as well as manual sliders. The red-eye remover and rotation tools are unremarkable, but you can embed text in your image.

Adobe Photoshop Album 2 is clearly intended to be a companion to an editor like Photoshop Elements. With Photoshop Album, you perform your edits in a dialog box that shows before and after views of potential changes. You can adjust brightness, contrast, and color–either automatically or manually–and sharpen the image, but aside from a rudimentary red-eye tool, that’s all this program offers.

Picasa 1.5 tries, but its convoluted interface and nonstandard approach to editing make it hard to recommend. The red-eye tool is difficult to use without a zoom control to help your accuracy. On the upside, the one-click color and brightness adjustments perform adequately, though they do not permit manual override.