Ulead has chosen to offer a number of different 'workspaces' - sets of menus and toolbars - geared to particular ways of using the program. There are workspaces for beginner and advanced photo editors, as well as those geared towards graphic and Web designers. The layout of the editing screen changes to reflect the editing mode you've chosen.

It's perhaps just as well the company has taken this approach, as the Advanced workspace, which shows everything that is available, is now very crowded and certainly takes some practice to work your way around. Some of the automated tools of the other products aren't duplicated in PhotoImpact 11 and others are there, but not in obvious places.

Take the Object Extraction Wizard, which aims to make the business of cutting a photo object from its background that much easier. You simply trace around the outside of the object you want to extract, but since there's no line detection to drag the marquee tightly around the edge of the object, it's hard to see what real advantage it offers over a lasso tool.

An interesting technique offered by PhotoImpact 11 is to combine photos of the same scene with different exposures. An obvious use for this is taking a night scene through an internally lit window. By setting up and taking a couple of exposures, one for the external and one for the internal view, you can use the program to combine the two into one, composite shot.

The program comes with a lot of extras, including Photo Explorer 8.6, which offers many different ways of viewing your photos and of tying them to dates and other metadata. There's the Cool 360 Panorama Creator, too, which can take a series of photos and turn them into a wraparound vista, the kind you used to find in many electronic encyclopaedias.