Ulead PhotoImpact

» see ulead.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The thing PhotoImpact did that nothing else in its price bracket did was refuse to flatten your work. You dropped text onto an image and it stayed an object with editable properties, sitting in a vector layer above the pixels, so coming back two days later to change one word did not mean rebuilding the whole graphic. Photoshop got there eventually. PhotoImpact was doing it in the nineties, in a box that cost a fraction as much.

Ulead Systems built it in Taipei, shipping PhotoImpact 3 in 1996 out of an older editor called Iedit, and kept the line going through thirteen major versions until PhotoImpact X3 in 2008. The company's whole strategy sat in the space Adobe was too expensive to occupy, and PhotoImpact was the clearest expression of it: a serious raster editor for people whose actual job was not image editing.

Look at what it shipped with and you can see who it was for. A rollover assistant sat next to an imagemap generator, and there was slice-and-export tooling for table-based layouts. This was a photo editor built by a company that understood its customers were mostly making web pages, at the exact moment when making a web page meant cutting one large picture into a grid of cells and hoping the browser reassembled it.

Turkey in the early 2000s was full of this software without anybody having chosen it. It arrived on the disc in the scanner box, or it arrived some other way, and either route ended with PhotoImpact installed on a machine whose owner could not have told you which country made it.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

OEM bundling was the entire distribution model and it worked absurdly well. Scanner manufacturers and camera manufacturers needed to put software in the box, Ulead was happy to license, and so a Taipei company ended up on millions of desktops across Asia and Europe with almost no brand recognition to show for it. The number of people who used PhotoImpact enormously exceeds the number who would name it.

Against Photoshop it was never going to win and never tried. Against Jasc Paint Shop Pro it was a real fight, two mid-tier editors chasing the same person, and Paint Shop Pro had the stronger name in English-speaking markets while PhotoImpact had the better web tooling and the deeper reach through hardware bundles.

~ the funny part ~

Both of them ended up owned by Corel. Jasc was acquired in October 2004 and Ulead came in through the InterVideo purchase that closed on 12 December 2006, which left one company holding two competing consumer image editors and no reason to keep both. Paint Shop Pro had the recognizable name in the market Corel sold into, so Paint Shop Pro lived.

PhotoImpact was discontinued in September 2009, less than three years after the acquisition, with X3 from 2008 standing as the last version. There was no final release and no announcement worth remembering. The vector object model that made it interesting went nowhere, and the web tools it was built around had already been made pointless by CSS. Nova Development kept selling a rebranded copy for a while afterward, which is the software equivalent of a body still being warm.

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