Ulead Photo Explorer™ - review

Digital Media Organizer and Editor

Regular visitors to our PHOTO Department can guess that we must spend a considerable amount of time with image editing tools. Yet we haven't before really had a lot to say about those tools.

Commercial professionals and amateur photographers alike have always known that for photo image editing, there are really only two tools: PhotoShop, and everything else.

For commercial artists, there's a wide selection of high-end professional tools to create original artwork: Illustrator, Corel Draw, and Quark. Many people swear by Paint Shop Pro. I'm no artist.

For Mac owners, "everything else" includes the powerful perennial shareware program GraphicConverter by Lemke. I have never seen anything to touch it on the PC side. (Beware, there is a simply dreadful pretender of the same name for Windows, but it is nowhere near similar in quality, features or power.)

PhotoShop is a stock-in-trade tool on both platforms. For those who don't have it, it is intimidating and non-intuitive, there's a steep learning curve, and the full purchase price is prohibitive for casual use. For those who do have it, it's what we use already, it's powerful and produces excellent output, and the upgrade path is pricey but bearable.

PhotoShop Elements or PhotoShop LE (Limited Edition) is said to contain the basic tools we use for most image editing operations. I am sure I would be using it if it had been offered back in the mid 1990's when I got into the Adobe upgrade path. One or the other retails for about $99, and LE is often bundled free with high end scanners or cameras.

"Everything else" also includes the low-end image browsers and album makers that sometimes double as entry-level editors. It is tough to sell quality software in this bracket, because so much mediocre stuff is given away for free (or should be) when you buy something else, or sign up for a web photo finishing service. My experience with these "friendly album makers" has generally been awful, and I am loathe to even try another of them.

Those of us working with large collections of images still find the browsers convenient sometimes, even though Windows now gives a decent thumbnail view of a folder of images. I have personally found Adobe PhotoShop batch processing to be unreliable, flaky, difficult to use or edit for re-use, and I avoid it wherever possible.

It is no fun opening a batch of (36) 37MB or 13MB images in Photoshop so that you can work on them, apply changes, and save them all to the same file or to a different folder. I gave up on the macros and use keyboard shortcuts, but this still takes a LONG time.

I wanted to convert a folder of icons to GIF format. For $599, PhotoShop won't do this; the file type *.ico is not recognized. I asked a friend for advice.

Enter Ulead.

He recommended that I buy Ulead Photo Explorer Pro 7.0, only $29.99. It is not what you think it is. From the packaging, price point and catalog pitches, it looks just like yet another image browser. Guess again. For starters, it did my file conversion effortlessly.

Photo Explorer is definitely an image browser, but it actually works. From a Windows-Explorer type pane you can bring up nested folders of images, one folder at a time, and display a thumbnail of each image sequentially in the main panel. Yes, you can create albums and slide shows. From what I have seen so far, you can then move the image folder, and the album or slide show will still work (if you stored the album file in the folder). Many programs get confused when you move a folder, and you have to create a new one from scratch.

Photo Explorer is also a surprisingly powerful and useful image editor. It should pay for itself many times over, even for veteran PhotoShop users. (See how easy it is to use PhotoShop or other external image editors from within Photo Explorer!)

The rich complement of menu items and descriptive icons support a powerful set of editing, file conversion and batch processing tools.

The editing tools take a sensible consumer approach: do you want more contrast, like this copy of your original, or less, like the other copy? Choose which looks best to you. More red? Red-eye reduction? I have not used these features yet, but it would not surprise me if they work very well.

Photo Explorer also supports TWAIN, so you can import images directly from a properly connected scanner or digital camera into the program for editing, saving, displaying or copying.

Photo Explorer allows you to use an external image editor application directly from within Photo Explorer. This is a powerful time-saver and works flawlessly.

Figure 1. Photo Explorer Image Browser window

I bring a full folder of images into Photo Explorer's browser, and double-click any one of them. This brings me into Photo Explorer's native image editing mode, where on any single image I can perform any of the editing operations already described, and more. But, from the menu's "use external editor" command, I have already defined PhotoShop as my external editor in Photo Explorer preferences, so I can open the image in PhotoShop for editing. (I created a custom button in Photo Explorer to save time).

In PhotoShop I can then zoom and crop the scanned image, apply color balance, level controls, contrast and/or brightness as I am already used to doing. I can scale it here too, but I now use the Ulead product to do this instead, as you'll see. I save my work and switch back to the open Photo Explorer application.

Figure 2. Photo Explorer Image Editor window

Photo Explorer's image editing window allows image navigation first-next-prev-last style (see Figure 2, top); it is not necessary to go back to Browser mode to go to the next image. I can edit the entire folder of images within PhotoShop without any file open or Windows Explorer commands, without ever leaving Ulead Photo Explorer. This alone is worth the purchase price!

Photo Explorer's batch processing functions are truly awesome and work extremely well. My new scanner produces an output file 37MB in size, a magnificent 3855x2570 pixel image. If the film was very new, was taken with a high-end removable lens 35mm camera, and was processed by Kodak, you can sometimes justify an image of this size for the very best photos. For older slides and negatives, or most commercial processing, the images at this size will show the wear and tear of time, fuzzy commercial scanning and cheap overextended developing solutions (graininess). It is just way too big.

For most work, I scale these down to 67% of full size, which is 13MB (file size is still proportional to image square inches), or 2582x1721 pixels. This is more than good enough for 17" monitor viewing, and far better than the 900x600 uploads we post for high-quality image viewing on this site.

Photo Explorer's strength here is in the simplicity and intuitive use of complex controls. To scale down 36 images in a batch operation, I would simply select all of them, and choose "Batch" from the menu.

The Batch menu command is "Convert Image Files". "Convert" panel allows you, at this point, to convert to a different file type (say, from TIF to JPG or GIF), change the data type (such as to grayscale), and/or scale the images to pixels or percent, saving to a new file and folder, or changing (overwriting) the old. I simply resize my original TIF's to 67 percent.

If you use Photo Explorer's built-in image editor, there's also another very powerful operation that allows you to apply the same kind of changes to ALL of the images. Learning to color-balance digital images in another application is like learning to think in a different language, so I prefer to stick with PhotoShop here. Also, I'm probably too cautious to allow any application to apply the same balancing or levels adjustments to all of the images in a collection. I feel more comfortable judging each image individually for effect, by hand, one at a time.

Support

Ulead maintains an extensive website with a help section and currently supported updates for all their products (Photo Explorer is up to version 7.02, and the updater ran smoothly). It looks like web support for Ulead products is substantial, and it will be useful to beginning and experienced users alike.

Bugs

I found two bugs in Photo Explorer 7.0, both associated with file type TIF. One is cosmetic, and one can cause a crash but there is a workaround. I suspect there is not a tight enough industry file specification on the older TIF file type, which is used on both Mac and PC platforms and is "lossless", meaning, a save or copy operation does not degrade image quality over time like the JPG and GIF image compression schemes.

(1) If an image is saved as TIF from a PhotoWorks (Seattle Film Works) program, Windows will not display a thumbnail of the image (not Ulead's problem), but most applications, including PhotoShop, can open and edit the TIF without issue. Photo Explorer cannot. It will crash with a "cannot read memory" error when it encounters this flavor of TIF. The workaround is to open these files in PhotoShop first, do something, and save the file. Something is added to the file that enables the Windows thumbnail and allows Photo Explorer to open it.

(2) TIF images saved in Photo Explorer will not display the Windows thumbnail (they do display in the Photo Explorer thumbnail image browser, of course). A black image is displayed in Windows Explorer instead, but Photo Explorer can still re-open the TIF images, so this is just a cosmetic issue in this case.

I saw no mention of these issues on the Ulead web site and have not reported them yet.

Conclusion and Rating

This product is of superb design and is a pleasure to use. It has saved me hours of work already. Due to its outstanding utility and low price, I didn't want to dock it a full point for the two bugs noted, so I created more "star" icons to allow half-stars, and awarded four and a half stars to this product.

All in all, I find Photo Explorer indispensable for the kind of work I do, and I feel I can recommend it highly, just as it was recommended to me. It is, frankly, underpriced for what it does so well. I will never be without it again.

Alex Forbes ©August 10, 2002