Product Reviews

Serif must be sick of reviewers constantly comparing PhotoPlus with Photoshop and its cheaper sibling, Photoshop Elements. The comparisons are inevitable, though, and PhotoPlus 10 has several new features that are similar to those of Photoshop's Album.

Just as Photoshop Elements 3 absorbed the separate Photoshop Album program to provide additional features for managing large collections of photos, the PhotoPlus Studio Pack now includes Serif's AlbumPlus to provide similar features. You can view your photo collections in various ways, sorting through them by month or year, or adding tags that sort pictures into categories such as family, friends and events. You can quickly combine a group of photos to create a slideshow.

PhotoPlus 10 has other similarities with Photoshop Elements. Its new Filter Gallery is just like the one found in Photoshop Elements, allowing you to add multiple filters and effects quickly to an image. The Filter Gallery interface isn't quite as straightforward, but it works well. The ability

You can now import RAW photo files from digital cameras. PhotoPlus can also read the EXIF data stored in image files, which provides information such as the type of camera used, focal length and the date and time the picture was taken. A histogram displays information about the distribution of light and dark pixels in an image and an improved rotation tool can rotate an image in fractions of degrees. These are all useful features, but in every instance PhotoPlus seems to be trying to catch up with Photoshop Elements.

However, closer inspection reveals new features that outshine those of Photoshop Elements. PhotoPlus 10 includes some excellent simple options, such as cropping an image using the rule of thirds to compose a scene as effectively as possible. PhotoPlus also offers more impressive features. The ability to adjust shadows, mid-tones and highlights automatically within an image is lacking in Photoshop Elements, as are the batch processing commands, which can be used here to rename multiple image files or convert them to different formats automatically.

PhotoPlus tackles other areas that Photoshop Elements ignores. It has options for creating animated graphics and using tweening to generate animated sequences automatically. You can take existing photos and drawings and hit the 'convert to animation' command to use them in animations.

Finally, Serif has cut the price from £80 to just £60, making PhotoPlus Studio Pack 10 excellent value and a genuine rival for Photoshop Elements.