I received a copy of PhotoDeluxe with my Kodak 280 camera. Over the years I have used several photo editing packages, none of which were high-end professional packages. I'm not sure I had a favorite, but for years I seemed to use Photo Finish marketed by Key Software the most. I have also used the Photo Enhancer that came with an earlier Kodak camera.

Then I, without making a decision, received Photo Deluxe. PD is now my favorite. There are tons of features that I have not even used. All the packages that I used had the capability of adjusting the picture's color balance, brightness, and contrast, but PD does it in a fashion that speeds up the process by a factor of ten. All one does is pull-up the controls and use slide pots to adjust the parameters. The effect is instantly previewed on the photo that you are editing. Now, this may not be a big deal to people who are used to using multi-hundred dollar packages, but to me it was wonderful. I once setup a color darkroom and went through the iterative process of balancing color, contrast, and exposure on color prints. It was tedious, to say the least. My other photo editing software worked similarly--showing a set of sample of several photos where the user picked the best one. One had to adjust cyan-red balance, then magenta-green, then yellow-blue, then repeat to see if one was satisfied with the previous settings. Arrgh!

Photo Deluxe does it all at once with three sliders above the photo. Tweak each slider and see the effect immediately. It is more like adjusting your color TV (remember when that had to be done) than printing test strips in the darkroom.

Cropping, sizing, and rotating are trivially easy, but that's true of most programs. I haven't used all the repair features, but get this, the remove moire actually works--and works well.

No editing program has it all. Photo Deluxe has some features that I haven't seen before: red-eye removal, restore old photo, remove dust. It also lacks others. There are no tools for painting-on contrast changes, sharpness, tint, and such. You won't be dodging exposure or tinting area. There is a clone tool though. You won't be "stitching" two photos together either. You can draw lines, erase, paint-on color, and smudge, but you won't be writing text on a picture.

The user interface confused me for a few minutes. I was always hunting-around for a tool. The names of the main menus were of no help to me. After a few uses, I simply remembered where things were. The program will load a variety of formats and save in a variety, but you have to explicitly tell it to save in any format except Photo Deluxe. Open a jpg file and you will have to "save as" to get it back into jpg. Then you will have to answer the question about saving the file in Photo Deluxe format--a real pain.

Bottom line: You need this program for finishing digital photos. You'll need others as well if you want to do special effects or put text in it. Like I said, none have all the tools you need.




Recommended: Yes