Version 5.1 Launched

[masque]

Xtreme5
Firstly I have to say I have no idea of the amount of work involved in the release of an updated piece of software. It might be a matter of hundreds of elfish like creatures beavering away all day and night, seven days a week for months or it might be a pasty faced youth in a room, with a packet of chocolate biscuits and a latte in a paper cup, for a couple of days over a weekend. Because of this I am loath to criticise.
However joining two applications together and calling it something new will be taken by some to be a bit of a letdown.
Page resizing, spellchecking, a slider to make photographs go from a bit blueish through to a bit orangy and better control of transparency is hardly not going to be there if you join an application that has those features to an application that doesn’t have them.
The layers gallery update is very welcome, I think, time will tell if it’s an improvement.
I had a moment of excitement when I spotted the mask tool and immediately loaded a photo, masked an area and tried to adjust hue, saturation and/or levels etc which came as a letdown when I found I needed to read some instructions regarding what it was really for, namely so I could load the only photograph I have of a ball on my not-dead-yet lawn, mask it and stretch the lawn to make it look bigger without the ball becoming an ellipse—interesting, but hardly essential unless I’m missing something, but I’m speaking as someone who has never used the contour tool.
I read that free hand drawing is now improved and that I might not need to tape the escape key down while drawing but I’ve yet to explore that.
Welcome though any improvements are, I can’t see that it justifies the ‘5’ apart from the fact that it’s a better looking number for the front of the forthcoming book than ‘4.5’, which as we all know already has a ‘5’ on it.
Needless to say I'm handing over my £39 upgrade fee, so disregard all the previous.
Derek