We Review: Photo Express from Ulead
Written by: J.P.

Ulead has several products for photography.
The latest is Photo Express 4.0 "My Custom
Edition" which is a photo editor. This review is
based on Photo Express 3.0 which is still available,
often at discount.  

The strength of the program is the ease of use.
With instruction balloon, text with icons and
a useful help area, the help section is very
good.  It also has useful features to save you
time in making things like posters, flyers,
greeting cards, calendars and even sports trading
cards.

Registered users can go the web site and
find additional templates for making greeting
cards and specific projects for different seasons.

The program is also designed to keep track of your
photos.  It allows the user to make albums of photo
projects and display them in a number of ways.  Like
seeing a slide show using four projectors at once.

With all the text and icons, the editing area for the
photo is smaller than with most photo editors.  The
photo image fills an area about one-quarter the width
and two-thirds the length of the entire screen.  The
image sits in the center.  While you can zoom in and
zoom out or change the dimensions of the photo, the
actual work area is not changeable.

An odd aspect of the program are the extra set of
close, minimize, and restore buttons that have no
function.

A useful feature is having many the seldom used
templates stay on the CD.  While large hard drives seem
to make this a moot point, images can take up a lot of
drive space.  I like this feature.

The program is set up in three parts.  Album, Photo and
Project.  Album is the area for storing photos, Photo is
where you edit the image and Project is where you get the
templates to create special things like flyers and cards.
Moving your work among the areas is not difficult.  

It has 17 different types of saving formats for images.
The usual jpeg, TIF and bmp to the more unusual like IFF
that is for the Amega computer. This features alone has
helped me work on projects where I use my PC Paint for
shaping the image and other programs for final edit.

You will find Photo Express by Ulead useful for many
personal imaging projects.  You can make comp cards
(also known as zed cards) for models, touchup photos
for portfolios, make promotional flyers for bands or
modeling events, and even create your own greeting cards.
Many of the tasks do not need much learning time once
you discover a few basics of the program.

While any photo editor can be used for professional use,
Photo Express is not a professional photo editor.  It lacks
full-screen editing, and the full controls over the image.
Also, users need to flip back and forth between screens for
some types of intensive editing.

If you want to go from image to project (greeting cards
to calendars), Photo Express has what you need.