With PhotoStudio you can enhance the brightness and contrast or adjust the shadows, midtones, or highlights of an image. You can also modify the hue or saturation in order to correct color shifts. There are image smooth and sharpen filters and some other interesting special filters like “Magic Mirror,” “Emboss,” and “Old Photo”. You will also find a full set of distortion filters like “wrinkle,” “splash”, “blur,” and “stretch.” I counted nearly forty special effects in all. PhotoStudio supports multiple layering so adding text or other graphical components to enhance your original image is fully supported.

Images in PhotoStudio consist of one or more layers. Every image starts out with a background layer (your image) that can be thought of as similar to a canvas when painting. Layers can then be added on top of that background and text, drawings, other images can be added, deleted, moved and edited on their individual layer without affecting your original background layer. A new layer starts out completely transparent so you can see the background layer through it. It remains transparent except for areas where you've added something to the layer.

Since most image formats do not support multiple layers, be sure to keep a copy of your work with the layers separate, just in case you want to edit it further. To do so, you must save it in PhotoStudio's PSF format. When you save in any other format, the layers will automatically be merged into a single background layer during the save process.

This package contains most of the functionality of much higher priced tools like PhotoShop, but at a much lower price. It even supports PhotoShop compliant plug-ins. A graphics enthusiast could be quite comfortable with the rather complete palate of tools for selecting, editing, retouching, painting and transforming images. However, the “average Joe” who just wants to clean up a few of the photographic errors on his pictures (like color balance problems from florescent lighting or red eye from the flash) maybe somewhat over whelmed. There is even a stitch function, but it is really just a ”glue on” function. It won’t do the edge matching, de-ghosting and color enhancing that a tool like ArcSoft’s Panorama Maker does so well. Of course, you can also print your images at any size and location on a page.

The manual on the CD was very limited. Recommendation: A good tool for an artist, but I would not necessarily recommend this package to a beginner. However, its very minimal resource requirements should place it high on the list for laptop users with a need for an image-editing tool.

Availability: PhotoStudio is $49.99 from ArcSoft. I could not find it at BestBuy or at Amazon.

Vendor information: ArcSoft was founded in 1994 and based in Fremont, California, ArcSoft uses digital imaging, software development and Internet innovation to bring exciting desktop and Web-based technologies to businesses and consumers worldwide. The company can be contacted via its Web site or by writing: ArcSoft Inc., 46601 Fremont Blvd., Fremont, CA 9453. Tel: 1.510.440.9901 • Fax: 1.510.440.1270

Minimum Requirements:

• Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
• Pentium II-based PC or equivalent
• 50 MB free hard disk space
• 64 MB RAM (128 MB recommended)
• 16-bit color display

Reviewer System Specifications
AMD Athlon 1.6 GHz, 1.25 GB RAM, 6 GB IDE drive with Windows XP Pro, 80GB Raid Drive, 64 MB ATI Radeon 7000, DirectX 9.0b, Firewire (IEEE 1394), USB 2.0, On-Lite DVD, On-Lite DVD+-R/RW/CD-R/RW burner, DirectX-compatible Sound Blaster Live card, Logitech Trackball, keyboard.