Corel Photo House 5

The first time APC saw Corel’s ‘Notebook’ interface, we weren’t convinced it was worth the space it takes up on the screen. However, we have come to appreciate it now that 17in monitors are more common. It augments the normal menus and toolbars with a context-sensitive list of choices that are task focused. For example, if no document is open, the Notebook suggests opening a file, starting a new document, opening a file from the catalog of content provided with the software (possibly augmented by the user), scanning a picture or downloading an image from a digital camera. When you open a file, the choices change to include editing and printing. This approach is good for beginners and can be quickly turned on or off, which is convenient for more advanced users.
Photo House provides useful filters such as red-eye, scratch and dust removal, and vignette, plus fun stuff including colour replacement, and ‘artistic’ effects like page curl.
One addition APC would really like to see is ‘handles’ on rectangular cropping areas so the selection can be resized. It was difficult to hit the exact area first time, and the fine adjustment allowed by Photoshop was missing. A good feature is that multiple overlapping areas can be selected, so it is relatively simple
to crop to a T or L shape. Other manual editing tools include the usual brushes, spraycans and erasers. Features once considered advanced but now found in low-end software include cloning and image spraying. Ils 10 undo levels are enough to allow you to recover from most mistakes, and more levels can be selected subject to available memory.
‘Optimise for Internet’ allows you to save images in JPEG, GIF or PNG formats, and it has a useful preview mode that shows the effect of increasing the compression or reducing the number of colours. Photo House supports a variety of other formats, induding Photoshop, FlashPix and Wavelet Compressed Bitmap.
Support for a good range of digital cameras is provided, but APC was surprised to find that Photo House required 66M of disk space with just one camera selected. It turned out that this was quite modest. Another issue is that when a CD-ROM other than the one currently in the drive is needed, the program tells you it’s the wrong disc, but doesn’t identify which one it wants.