Photo-Suit

Photo-Suit Professional offers a solid set of features in a familiar, Photoshop-inspired interface. New users should however be warned that the toolbar, the tools box and the palette box will be visible only after the corresponding options in the View menu are checked.

We liked the selection of tools. Though it is not as wide as in Photoshop it is still enough to meet most users’ needs – there is the brush, airbrush, fill tool, eyedropper (get color), stamp, etc. and also a decent collection of adjustments and filters. Unfortunately, the stamp cannot be used as the clone tool, as in Photoshop. To use it, you have to select color with the eyedropper tool or the palette.

Actually, the lack of tooltips or extended user help makes the work a lot more difficult, so users with little experience may not handle some tools efficiently. Moreover, the interface is not context-sensitive. That is, it does not immediately display parameters for selected tools, so you have to open the totally independent Tool options dialog to adjust tools’ parameters.

Surprisingly, you don’t seem to be able to zoom out on images that makes working with large pictures a little problematic. We also found it inconvenient that preview windows provided for most adjustments and effects are too small. But the biggest disappointment for users will be that the software will let them save files in bmp format only.

Of course you can test the software to see if it will prove useful to you - all the more so because Photo-Suit Professional does not leave watermarks on images during its 7-day trial period. Anyway, we believe that the program usability should definitely be improved.