The new program, Photoimpact, more than justifies the purchase. In particular, its capability to optimize images for inclusion in websites makes it a "Must-have" for the website author. My ownly negative is that it takes a while to load. But I can tolerate that in view of the time I save editing images.
I will have to admit that this product is definitely not for novices and there is a learning curve. I would think this product is of professional grade. There are some great home edition products for novices like the photo editors that come bundled when you purchase a digital camera or when you buy digital prints on a CD, etc.
We had a pile of pictures taken through the years of our children and I wanted to make a collage out of them. I scanned the pictures in and created a 20 X 30 collage out of them using this product. I uploaded the collage to Ofoto (Amazon's Photo site - the best I found!!) and had a 20 X 30 print made out of it. It came out just great!!
If you're patient and willing to learn the concepts of this product than it is great and the sky is the limit of what you can do with it. You'll never use all features of this product.
I am only giving it fours stars just to draw attention to my review to say that it is a complex product. I am sure that people who gave low marks really did not want to take the time to read the manual and/or understand the concepts.
Things that one might want to get with this? One is a pressure sensitive pad with a stylus to take full advantage of it's retouching capabilities. You will also need a powerful CPU, I'd say at least a gig, and plenty of memory. Remember, graphics can take up a lot of space, so a large hard drive is nice too.
If you use it, you'll love it. If you love it, you'll want to update to the lates version.
Doug Lester