Product Reviews

Serif's PhotoPlus has been gaining ground on slightly pricier rivals like Photoshop Elements and Corel Paint Shop Pro. But with both Adobe and Corel launching new versions, can it keep up?

Some of Version 11's enhancements are immediately obvious. At the foot of the screen, the Documents tab shows thumbnails of all your open files and similar to Photoshop Elements' Photo Bin, it's handy when working with several pictures. Next door is the How To tab, which offers step-by-step guides to basic operations. However, as it's squashed into a palette that already houses Layers, Paths, Macros and Channels, it feels rather cluttered.

At the top of the screen, the PhotoStudio Toolbar provides buttons to launch the new QuickFix Studio and Filter Gallery. The Filter Gallery lets you experiment with multiple filters in one window, but Serif's implementation feels basic, with filters listed in a text menu rather than shown as thumbnails.

A quick fix

QuickFix Studio is arguably the biggest new feature. It's a resizeable window where you can apply ten basic adjustments and the results are seen on a large preview, along with the original, side by side. So you get essential corrections all in one place and you can adjust each of them until you get the right result. But while we like anything that saves us time, QuickFix could have been more useful if the variety of tools had been better selected. The new Lens Distortion, Chromatic Aberration and Lens Vignette filters are good, but not many photos actually need them and although the Straighten,

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Crop and Red Eye functions are more practical, they gain little from being brought together in one place.

Rescuing photos with wayward colours is also hindered by Quickfix's limited range of adjustments. The Colour option offers white balance to correct a photo by choosing the light conditions it was shot under, such as Cloudy or Tungsten, but this rarely works well by itself, so you'll need to fiddle with three extra sliders, which isn't exactly 'Quick'. The other filters, Brightness and Contrast, don't help much either as they are markedly inferior to the Levels and Curves adjustments, which are accessible in PhotoPlus but not in QuickFix Studio.

The final annoyance is that QuickFix is divorced from the rest of PhotoPlus. For example, you scroll the mouse wheel to zoom into a photo, then decide to use QuickFix. The image preview resets to the default zoom, so you scroll to zoom back in. In QuickFix, the mouse wheel doesn't zoom, it sets an adjustment, which you now have to undo.

Some of PhotoPlus 11's smaller additions are more successful. There's a screen capture utility similar to Paint Shop Pro's, which is great if you need to grab images from other programs. The Straighten tool is similarly handy as it lets you rotate a photo by drawing along a line that should be horizontal or vertical. Text handling has been improved too - you can edit text directly on an image, and a new Character tab offers extra controls. You still can't set up proper text blocks with word wrapping, though.

Get organised

The Studio Pack also includes AlbumPlus 4 which is a competent photo organiser. As well as filing your photos by category, you can sort them by all kinds of other criteria and create slideshows. For web designers, PhotoPlus also supports image slicing, image maps and layer-based animation.

Serif's image editor isn't as polished as Photoshop Elements, but is less limited in areas such as layer handling. Compared to Paint Shop Pro Photo XI though it's not as solid and only a few quid cheaper. After the major improvements in version 10, this upgrade just isn't the impressive leap forward we were hoping for.