Product Reviews

Unless you're a budding David Bailey, you probably take the odd photo that's a bit gloomy or suffers from red-eye. To fix this, you need a good image editing program. Serif's PhotoPlus 10 aims to provide everything you need to manage and edit photos for under 60 quid - and it just about succeeds.

The package comes in two parts. One lets you manipulate digital images, while the other, AlbumPlus, lets you organise them. The latter is less ambitious than its photo editing counterpart - it lets you create a decent slideshow, but that's about the only creative function. It's also less closely integrated with the editing process than rivals products, but it works fine and is unfussy to use.

The main program in this package, PhotoPlus 10, will look pretty familiar to users of other image editors. It has a set of dockable tabbed palettes down the right-hand side, a toolbox on the left, and an options bar at the top. In fact, it's generally reminiscent of Photoshop. A few tweaks have been made in this version to tidy up the on-screen controls even further, but there are much more substantial additions that really bring PhotoPlus into the major league.

You can now record macros (mini programs within a program) to automate regularly used functions. These are a huge time-saver when you want to convert a set of pictures to low resolution for e-mailing, or correct a colour problem.

PhotoPlus

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previously had good support for layers, a technique that allows you to add a number of changes to an image at once. This includes full masking facilities, which allow you to select an area of the photo to be excluded from any alterations you make. This is far better than the cut-down layers function offered by PhotoShop Elements. You can now also group layers, which makes complex photomontage effects easier to achieve. Layer effects, which add glows, shadows and bevels to cut-out images or shapes, can now be controlled and combined more effectively, and as in Paint Shop Pro 9 you can now use more realistic paintbrush effects.

For more experienced users, PhotoPlus could already display a 'histogram', a chart of the pixel-by-pixel colour values in an image. As in Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro, this now has its own palette that you can refer to at any time. Unfortunately, it doesn't update while you use adjustments such as Levels, which really misses the point of having a live histogram in the first place. Similarly, you can now edit the individual red, green and blue (RGB) channels in an image, but that won't satisfy serious retouchers, who would be better with a Lab colour mode. Anyone preparing images for use in commercially printed publications will want CMYK editing. You can export a PDF file with colours converted to CMYK, but you're much more likely to need to save a CMYK TIFF, and it's a shame PhotoPlus can't do this - although, to be fair, nor can Photoshop Elements.

PhotoPlus 10 is one heck of a package for the price. It can't quite match Paint Shop Pro 9's tricks for correcting noise, lens distortion and lighting problems, and its painting tools aren't quite as impressive, but in other respects its features compare very well. The user controls are also more straightforward and Photoshop-like, and it offers more image editing features than Photoshop Elements. This makes PhotoPlus 10 a great choice if you can't stretch to Paint Shop Pro 9's £80 price tag.