Review: Serif Photoplus 11 image-editing software

In the consumer market, Serif isn’t as well-known as some. However, Photoplus 11 tries hard to outdo better-known rivals from Adobe, Corel and Ulead.

While looking like a conventional image editor, with tools down the left-hand side and palettes down the right, a lot of the new features are worked together into separate pop-up windows.

The major newbie in Serif Photoplus 11 is the Quickfix Studio, where various common photo adjustments are grouped in a selector at top right, with controls underneath, popping up as your select the group you want to work with. A preview of the adjustment is also displayed.

The most obvious adjustments include brightness and contrast, colour (though not white balance) and sharpen tools, but there are more unusual ones, too. Lens distortion and chromatic aberration can be automatically corrected and lens vignettes can be adjusted by darkening or lightening the corners of an image.

A useful correction is the ability to straighten an image, by aligning some vertical or horizontal line, maybe a wall or roofline, with an overlaid grid.

Functions that were fiddly in Serif Photoplus 10 a year or so ago, like red-eye removal, are simple one-click tasks, now. Highlight each eye in turn and red pupils go black without having to fill in the individual pixels. An extension of this is the colour replacer, which can turn a range of shades from one colour to another, so all the tones of paintwork in a blue car can go to their corresponding greens. This function, like some of the others, could do with a step-by-step undo.

The Extract Wizard enables you to outline part of a photo to turn into an object. Most current photo editors can do this, but Serif’s offering is more versatile than most, with the ability to draw an outline and touch up exactly which parts are to be included in the extraction and which not; by using modified paint and eraser tools.

With a nod to Paint Shop Pro, which could always do it, Photoplus 11 can now grab selected portions of screens or individual windows using a hotkey and include the cursor in the grab. As with Photoplus 10, Serif’s Albumplus 4 photo manager comes bundled with the editor.

Photoplus 11 continues to provide a wide range of project ideas. It also offers specialist print templates to reduce wastage when printing multiple images.

Overall, there are plenty of useful extensions to the feature set in Photoplus 11 and it’s at least as easy to achieve what you want from images as with its main rivals. That being said, it should be on any shortlist when shopping for image-editing software or a photo-editor.

Also consider
Adobe Photoshop Elements 5
A solid – if unspectacular – upgrade to Adobe’s popular photo-editor

Ulead Photoimpact 12
In features and usability, Ulead Photoimpact 12 is well up with its main rivals and at a giveaway price too.

Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI
This aging photo-editor can still learn a few new tricks

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