Thread: Arcsoft PhotoStudio 6

Arcsoft PhotoStudio has long been recognized as a cost-effective alternative for correcting, manipulating and using your photos in a variety of creative ways. Since Arcsoft Photo Studio 6's interface follows familiar standards, you'll find it easy to jump into if you've had any past experience with photo editing. Absolute novices, however, may regret its perfunctory online Help menu and its lack of a search engine.

Also, only a handful of effects dialog boxes have convenient links to tutorials and explanations about the various commands and options in that specific window. Arcsoft Photo Studio 6 provides a full set of enhancement tools for correcting exposure, color, and so on. The new Image Levels Adjustment works well for precise control over highlights, midtones, and shadows, and the Auto Exposure command lets you leave precision to the programmers.

Arcsoft Photo Studio 6 adds four new filters to its sizable library of special effects. Though they have lots of promise, the new-comers are uneven in their execution. For instance, Beautify does a lovely job of automatically recognizing a face in a portrait photo and smoothing out skin imperfections, but it failed to recognize the face in one of our portraits, because (as Arcsoft explained) Beautify works only when the person faces directly into the camera - and our test subject was at a slight angle to the camera.

Another important new filter, Magic Cut, does a reasonable job of removing backgrounds from pictures, so you can paste your subject into another picture. It works by drawing lines through the area you want to keep (your foreground' subject) and other lines through the area you want to remove (the background); Arcsoft Photo Studio 6 automatically does the rest.