Ease of Use:  

Photo Explosion is laid out well with clearly marked tabs: importing, editing, printing, sharing, and web. Once you drill down, however, the functions become repetitious. You have to go through several steps to accomplish each task, unlike the better integrated functions in the higher ranked programs. 

Importing:  

Import photos directly from a digital camera, a scanner, CD-ROMs and online photo-sharing services. Unfortunately, you cannot import photos directly from a removable device like a SmartCard often used in digital cameras. Instead, you have to manually open them. 

Editing:  

Photo Explosion comes with most of the features to fix common photo problems. You can straighten, crop, adjust the brightness and contrast, adjust the hue and saturation, focus, and remove red-eye. Use SmartEnhance to automatically adjust lighting, color, or focus. Or, you can adjust them manually by selecting from several thumbnails. To remove red-eye, select a brush size and click on the red part of the eye. You can also change the eye color.

Layers in this program are simply built-in objects, text or multiple photos that you can move and edit independently of the other objects. You can change the opacity of each object but you cannot apply a gradient transparency to merge the two together.

The text tool is easy to use, but involves an extra step. Type text in a text box and then apply and place. You can go back and easily edit the text at any time.

Use batching to enhance, rotate, or convert multiple photos to different file formats. You cannot record your own sequence of actions with Photo Explosion.

The undos are limited in this program—don't go too far before you can't go back.

Bonus Feature

• Morph one photo into another.
• Create a panorama with automatic photo stretching, alignment and color blending

Sharing:  

Photo Explosion offers several ways to share your photos and animations. Use 3000+ print project templates to create greeting cards, calendars and scrapbook pages. Email photos. Optimize photos for cell phones, MP3 players, and PDAs. Post a web album or choose from 200 printing templates.

Using a separate application that comes with Photo Explosion, you can make photo slideshows and burn to a CD to play in a VCD-compatible DVD player. Photo Explosion can only use JPEG image files and .mp3 or .wav music file formats. 

Output Capabilities:  

Photo Explosion supports 12 of the most common file formats adequate for the typical user. If you need to upload images for web pages though, consider a program like Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 that lets you see a preview of the different compression settings before you save it. 

Organizing:  

The ability to organize and search for photos is insufficient. It's a folder tree structure of your hard drive and searchable by keyword in the file name. There are no ranking or advanced search or sort capabilities. 

Help/Support:  

Photo Explosion comes with a User Manual and integrated help. The Help has detailed steps and instructions but no screenshots. Access a short list of FAQs on the site and contact a technical support rep with an online form. 

If you want to have fun with your photos—apply simple effects, make greeting cards, send to a friend’s iPod, or post animations online—Photo Explosion is a good choice. Great for kids’ projects with more clip art and templates than any other software in this group. Photo Explosion is family friendly software at a good price.