Review by D. Johnson

I really do hate giving a product only one star but this product has earned it.nI am puzzled because Corel has most of the facilities to produce a user friendly photo editing program at low cost.nAfter all, they have all of the routines coded already. In addition, since they bought out Ulead, they now have two different approaches to photo editing.

While I realize that they were targeting the casual photographer, that can be done with existing routines from their other products. I use Automatic Photo Correction all of the time from their Ulead Photoimpact product that does cost three times as much as this one does but it has so many more capabilities that cause it to cost that much more. But its basic functions could have been put into this product and been even easier to use than this one is with more capabilities and still meet their cost goals.

Their automatic photo correction isn’t much better than Windows Picture Gallery and that is a free component of Windows.nThe only major capabilities missing from Picture Gallery are the ability to change the picture size and to rotate the picture.nBut those features are already functional in Photoimpact as well as several other Corel products.

The overall feeling I got using this product is the same I got using ACDSEE’s editor only clumsier. The suggested retail price of ACDSEE is the same as for Photo Express but ACDSEE has so many more features they are not in the same league. Yet their target customer is the same as Corel’s is, the casual photographer maintaining their home scrapbooks.

All I can say is that simple doesn’t have to mean simplistic and even casual photo editors are going to want to do a few fancy things like add fancy text or stylize some of their photos.