Product: PhotoSuite III Platinum Edition
Company: MGI Software
Website: http://www.mgisoft.com
Estimated Street Price: $49.95
Review By: Julien Jay

Features

MGI PhotoSuite III is built on the Microsoft Internet Explorer engine. Indeed the software architecture use DHTML and Active X controls. This allows it to deliver users with free updates through the Internet. But users need to have Microsoft Internet Explorer installed. If not the setup will install Internet Explorer. However users will still be able to use Netscape Navigator if it’s their favorite web-browser. The immediate benefit of the IE engine is that users can surf the net directly from the PhotoSuite III window. It’s a cool and innovative idea that allows, for example to drag photos from webpage to add them directly to the PhotoSuite library. Another interesting feature that Microsoft Internet Explorer brings to PhotoSuite III is the integration with the Kodak photo net service.

Interface

With PhotoSuite III it’s clear that MGI has put “savoir-faire” to bring users an easy to use, cool looking interface. That’s right, learning PhotoSuite III is fast and the intuitive interface brings a lot of features at the users’ fingers tips by showing them in a logical manner through the navigation bar. Also the new plastic look like buttons doesn’t have any icons on it but texts to better guide novice users. When you launch PhotoSuite III, a very clear graphical homepage is displayed. This homepage is your PhotoSuite III starting place where you can select which activities you want to start: prepare photo, get pictures from a scanner/digital camera, compose projects, organize your pictures, surf the net, share your pictures or print them. The ‘prepare photo’ is the best way to open a picture and touch it up. When you click on it at the left of the screen an activity panel will be displayed: from it you can select every kind of actions to do on your pictures; a toolbar will also be displayed. From it you can select painting tools and touch up tools. Finally the right border of the screen is used to display the photo albums where you can select stored objects/pictures...

  Hopefully you can hide the library panel to enhance your work surface. Each time you click a button in PhotoSuite a funny sound will be played. It’s one of the features that remind users that PhotoSuite is general public software. Note that unfortunately you can’t use the paste command to create a new document if the clipboard contains a picture (you should first create a new document).

Touchup Tools

Surprisingly PhotoSuite III Platinum Edition comes with a lot of cut-out tools which is a little bit unusual in that kind of software. But we won’t complain about this! The selection tools, feature the traditional magic wand, elliptical/rectangular selection tools, free-hand selection tool and an edge finder selection tool. Concerning this last one, it’ll select objects that are near the lines you draw. All this selection tools will really help users to touch up efficiently their pictures. However we found the magic wand tool a little bit imprecise even if you can tweak the tolerance setting. Every selection you make with PhotoSuite III can be moved, cloned, delete, rotate and much more: it’s one of the great PhotoSuite touch-up features. PhotoSuite III also comes for the first time in the picture software world with a multiple undo feature that will undo every user’s actions. But that’s not all! MGI PhotoSuite III also comes with a clone tool like in major picture software. So you can clone where you want on your picture some object or parts of objects by simply moving your mouse over the photo. Great isn’t it? There’s also a collage feature that will help you to make Finally even if you can zoom in on a picture due to the small photo workspace that offers PhotoSuite III you can’t accurately touch up pictures in pixel mode.

Painting Tools

As you may need for some touch-ups to draw new objects on photo, PhotoSuite III comes with drawing tools that include filled & unfilled shape tool, brush tool, line tool, effect brush tool and the traditional eraser/color fill tool/color selector tool. You can even choose the styles of your brushes to touch up your photos, but you can also set the size and the shape of the brushes. So the drawing features of PhotoSuite III are very complete and will allow you to freely express your creativity.

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