Image Editing Software

You're off to a great start, but now it's time to get creative. Change that drab background, sharpen and rotate the images, and add some bold text--you can do it with the right image editing software.

The image you scanned in to your PC is perfect--well, almost. The green background is a little on the sickly side, and there's a weird line across the lower left-hand corner where the photo was creased. Oh, and something that looks like spinach is stuck between the teeth of an otherwise dazzling smile--nothing a little image editing can't fix.

Whether you need to create a photo composition, jazz up an existing image, or simply retouch a photograph, an image-editing package is a vital tool. But you don't have to be a professional artist or designer to spurn programs that treat you like an amateur. Look for an image editor that provides TWAIN support so you don't have to hassle with scanner compatibility problems, masking tools so you can select areas of an image to edit or protect from editing, and the ability to produce color separations so you can prepare images for four-color printing. So do you need to shell out nearly 900 bucks for a full-blown professional program like Adobe Photoshop, or would you be adequately served by the image-editing tools included in a graphics program that costs almost half as much? We compared seven products: Adobe's Photoshop 2.5 for Windows, Aldus's PhotoStyler 2.0 for Windows, and Micrografx's Picture Publisher 4.0, which are image editors; Fractal Design's Painter 2.0 with PainterX2 and Fauve Software's Fauve Matisse 1.25, which are primarily paint programs; and CorelDraw 4 and CPI's Image-In Professional 3.2, which are all-in-one graphics programs.

Image Conscious With each of these programs, we tackled common image-editing tasks: calibrating a monitor, scanning in an image, correcting the image's color, retouching the image, creating a color separation, and creating a proof. Calibrating the monitor adjusts the display so that the color of the image that shows up onscreen is consistent with the color of the image that is scanned in or printed out. We looked at how easy or difficult the programs make this task, the sensitivity of the calibration controls, and the overall results.

Adjusting the color of a scanned image is one of the most common tasks you'll need your image editor to do. You'll want the ability to adjust the image's overall color balance, individual color channels, hue, saturation, and lightness. All of the programs enable you to do this, but the best offer automatic options, as well as precise control and more than one way to achieve just the right balance. What distinguishes these programs from each other is their ability to manipulate and edit images, or create new ones.

Dedicated image editors typically offer more tools for altering existing images, while graphics programs specialize in creating new ones. Look for quality and variety in the selection of tools and filters for creating special effects. All of the programs we examined have such basic selection tools as rectangular, freehand, and elliptical, plus a magic wand tool for selecting color. Your program should also make it a breeze to extend or delete part of a selection area.