Ulead PhotoImpact 6 (PI6) is a professional, graphics editing software package that contains a huge set of tools and functions for changing or designing images, which may be used as-is or for web pages.

Street price of PI6 is about $99, but the box that I received showed upgrade rebates of $40 for owners with earlier versions of PI, and $20 for owners of various other competitive graphics packages. For installation, PI6 requires: Win 95, 98, NT, or 2000; Pentium-compatible system; 32MB Ram, 240MB hard drive. My computer installation first showed PI6 to be 293 MB of software, spread over 425MB of hard drive, a sizeable chunk of drive real estate.

I've been advocating a standard practice of going out to the vendor website to look for updates, following the installation of a newlyinstalled software package … which I did. There, waiting for me, was a whopping 11.4MB, PI6, Update Patch withsomething like 14 software fixes. Patch download increased the PI6 hard drive real estate to 305MB of software, spreadover 438MB of hard drive.

The software comes with a 275 page User Guide containing excellent tutorials on PI6 use. Although the software's literature is tilted toward its webcapabilities, over 60% of the guide details PI's full compliment of pure,graphic, art design. So even users whonever intend designing a single web page, will find PI6 to be an ideal graphicsprogram. It has graphic and user-friendly capabilities that rival competingsoftware at six times the cost. Thus,it supports over 30 graphic and image formats, comes with 1000 photos, 1000clipart, 800 web components, animators, textures, fonts, and the full set ofstandard tools for modifying or creating graphics and web elements.

It has a separate Photo Album for storing thumbnails of,links to, and information about thousands of images and files that you maychoose in your computer. The albumforms a super convenient catalog tool for a fast retrieval of images to variouspurposes. One can easily print images,send them by E-mail or create slide shows.

For creating web pages, there are ready-to-use buttons,bullets, icons, banners, facilities for roll-over, image-slice, gif-animation,HTML coding of a web page for transfer to the Internet, and Wizards to help.Accessing these facilities is easily done from a 'Web' tab on PI6's basicwindow.

Let me mention some of the features I found especiallystriking in using PI6. Changing thecolor and tone aspects of a photograph with PI6 are the easiest and most effective that I've used in other graphic programs. Photo changes are made with a set of '+' and '-' buttons which when clicked make small incremental changesthat are immediately seen on the FULL photo. In competing software I've used, such changes are usually first viewed as thumbnails and then transferred to the full photo requiring re-dos in many cases.

Another facility that expedites graphic productivity is the'Easy Palette', a set of 19 'Galleries' and 'Libraries' each fanning out into asizeable corresponding set of items to use. There is a 'Fill Gallery', ' Filter Gallery', 'Brush Gallery', 'ImageLibrary', 'Shape Library', 'Web Library', etc. The 'Brush Gallery', for example expands into 139 various brush effects.

Using various fonts is a breeze with PI6. Aside from the extra fancy fonts available in the 'Type Gallery', standard fonts are easily chosen from the common roll-down window, but as the mouse curser is passed over a given font a sidewindow pops up showing the font itself. Furthermore, fonts can be easily shaped along all sorts of curves, circles, and areas.

A home computer user, serious about becoming creative incomputer graphics (which, at worse, is a fascinating pastime), can do no better than PI6. It will serve from working asa novice through working as a professional. For any user, PI6 is worth trying. A trial copy of PI6 can be downloaded from: www.ulead.com.