Software is designed to make your job easier, but sometimes it just doesn't. Many programs either have a difficult learning curve or contain so many bells and whistles that the one thing you set out to do (say, fix a photo) becomes a frustrating experience. Luckily, not all programs are such brain puzzlers. ArcSoft's PhotoImpression 3.0, a photo-editing program designed for amateurs, is genuinely easy to learn and use.
PhotoImpression 3.0 is for folks who don't know a lot about image editing but want to make their photos look great. It features simple tools for editing and retouching, adding special effects, drawing, adding text, creating cards and calendars, and more. After a painless installation, we launched the program.
PhotoImpression blankets your desktop with a slick-looking, full-screen graphical interface that hints at Mac OS X design elements. You can find the command categories via push buttons on the left side of the screen. The tools and options for each command are at the bottom, and the toolbar appears on the right. However, we have a gripe about the placement of the window status buttons at the top of the screen. Pressing the upper-right button exits the program — we Mac folk are accustomed to having the minimize button in that spot, so this caused us to quit accidentally on several occasions.
The Retouch and Enhance features include selection tools, crop, paintbrush, pen, clone, red eye, tone control, sharpen, hue/saturation, brightness/contrast, and even autoenhance (this tool adjusts a photo's levels and contrast — it performed well, but only on photos that didn’t have severe color casts or major exposure problems). ArcSoft gets bonus points for layer support, which lets you make spot adjustments to different parts of an image. Forthe average job, most of these tools work well, but you'll have to wait for the program to catch up with your actions.
In our testing, we noticed that PhotoImpression reacted slowly to certain image-orientation changes. It took 5 seconds to flip an image horizontally and another 15 seconds to turn an image 90 degrees. When we rotated an image using the freehand rotate tool, we didn't think our change had registered — the image remained unchanged for 10 seconds.
Making selections was difficult with the polygon tool — when we drew around an object to select it, we had difficulty seeing the highlighting line that showed where we were tracing. Also, the lack of either a color-correcting or a white-balancing tool is an issue, since colorcasts are a common problem with digital and scanned photos, and the hue tool alone can’t do the job.
Once you’ve fixed your photo, you can drop it into one of several premade borders and cutouts instead of trapping it inside a plain old square. You can also drop a photo into a greeting-card template (Hallmark they ain't) or have a good laugh superimposing a friend’s face onto one of the bodies in the PhotoFantasy feature.
Overall, PhotoImpression 3.0 does a good job of fixing photos that don't suffer from color problems, and it’s easy enough for even computer novices to use. However, the program’s sluggishness and paltry color-correcting controls get pretty wearisome. It almost rates a Spiffy! — but it just misses.
Fong, Kirs. (June 2001). PhotoImpression 3.0. MacAddict. (pg. 57).
ArcSoft
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
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2015-08-13 / 
2025-03-30 / 
c750a54b6e84afcee9857d98c3aee0bccec98ebd / 
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PhotoImpression_3.toast_.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
