Product: Print Office 2000
Company: Corel, Inc.
Website: http://www.corel.com
Estimated Street Price: $49.99
Review By: Julien JAY

Corel Photo House 5

Your first step in the digital photo world will be entirely assisted by the help of the guided activities panel that offers you a simple and intuitive selection of activities to start your work. From capturing pictures directly from your digital camera or scanner to open a file everything is simple when using Corel Custom Photo. For example, traditional open or save boxes are replaced by user-friendly pictures (that make sense for novice users) in order to help them open an already stored photo. Another example of the unrivalled conviviality of Corel Photo House is the fact that when you’re browsing a folder to open pictures, a small thumbnail of the photo replaces picture file icons. Working on a photo in Corel Photo House is ‘just’ a child game as the tools that the software is remarkably simple to use! Touching tools include gum, magnifying glass, clone tool to reproduce specific areas of the picture, pipette to grad the exact color you want to use, vaporizer to spray points on your picture, fully customizable brush tool that allow anyone to draw over the existing picture (you can change the size of the brush, the style of the brushing so you can use a chalk or a pastel drawing for example, finally you can change the color of the brush), painting pot to easily fill a shape with a defined color and the last tool included is the picture vaporizer that’ll create by following your mouse drawing a suite of different images: that is to say you can create a suite of letters from A to Z that’ll follow your drawing. Sure you can customize this tool in order to assign your own pictures instead of the letters. When editing photos, everyone knows that an undo feature is essential to remove the drawing mistakes you may have made when your cats jump on you while you were touching up your girl friend photo: hopefully Corel Custom Photo comes with a multi level undo/redo feature ensuring that you’ll be able to restore mistakes proof versions of your pictures. In terms of selection tool, Corel is not in rest with this software as three different & efficient tools are provided to allow users apply changes to parts of an image without altering the entire image. The first selection tool is conventional as you simply select a part of the picture by drawing a rectangle. The second one is also common to almost every pictures touching program, as it is a free-lasso that allow selecting accurately some complex parts of the picture. One good thing to note is that when you draw a lasso selection nearby a rectangle selection the lasso selection will be instantly added to your rectangle making a wider selection. The third selection tool is the most impressive one: it’s a brush selecting tool that means you can select parts of pictures like if you were painting a canvas. This is an innovative tool as everything that is inside the width of the brush pencil is selected but not the outside. As usual with Corel graphic products removing a rectangle or any other kind of selection is easy, as you just have to click the forbidden panel button. However and strangely no magic wand tool is provided to make smart selections. Sure you can rotate pictures the way you want using predefined or custom measures. As the software supports what we can call layers adding vector objects to an existing bitmap picture and moving them, resize them or remove them later isn’t a problem. Best of all the objects you add to the current picture can be rotate or resize freely like in Corel PhotoPaint using the anchor points. Corel has also included a powerful text editor in this software package that allows adding custom titles to every drawing using different fonts (we regret the lack of font preview in the font selector tool), different sizes and much more.  Corel PhotoHouse 5 is fully compliant with Corel Draw 9.0 as you can read the Corel Custom Photo files using the professional top-notch software from Corel. Corel Photo House also comes with a wide set of 30 different special effects users can apply to their pictures easily. Like any other home oriented touching up tool, Corel Photo House includes touch-up effects that allow repairing the red-eye effect, and brighten, darken or sharpen an image. Special effects also contain wave, whirlwind, negative, eddy and much more. Corel Photo House 5 also comes with advanced masking options that allow users to assign transparency effects (six different ones) to objects in order to enhance the look of every image!  Note that the main interface of Photo House displays a color toolbar where you can select or customize the color you want to use. The skew tool of Corel Photo House is a minor tool but an useful one adjust the angle of an image. For digital cameras Corel Photo House 5 comes with a supports of many types of digital cameras that work like profiles to enhanced the quality of an image based on the digital camera you’ve got. Finally every image can be resample to change the size, resolution and the color depth of the picture.

Corel Photo House 5 in action (click to enlarge)