Serif Photoplus 9

Photoplus isn't the best-known program in this group, but it?s reasonably priced and provides a powerful range of editing features that make it a strong rival for the likes of Photoshop Elements. In fact, Serif seems to have its sights very much set on Elements, as there are more than a few striking similarities between the two programs.

The use of tabbed palettes to provide access to most of the program's main tools is forgivable, as many graphics programs use similar features these days. However, many of the palettes in Photoplus provide identical features to their counterparts in Elements, and work in essentially the same way.

The Navigator palette in Photoplus is virtually identical to that in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, providing the ability to instantly zoom in on specific areas of an image. The History palette works just like Photoshop's, storing a list of all the changes you make to an image so that you can quickly step back to any point in the editing process.

Many photo-editing programs provide the ability to work with layers, but the special adjustment layers that allow you to store tonal corrections within a layer, rather than applying them directly to an image, are also clearly inspired by Photoshop?s own adjustment layers.

There's also a sense of d‚j… vu when you look through the program's selection of filters and special effects. However, Photoplus doesn't score quite as well as Elements here. Like Microsoft's Digital Image Suite, it's let down by a number of artistic filters that just don?t work very well, merely producing images that look like blobs of colour rather than realistic natural-media effects. There's a special Giger filter, which we think is meant to produce effects in the style of Alien artist HR Giger but in fact seems to just spray a kind of spidery cobweb effect over an image.

To be fair, though, Photoplus doesn't simply copy Photoshop Elements blindly. It does include a number of features that make the program worth considering in its own right. There's a wide range of brush and pen styles that can be used for creating your own artwork, as well as some useful vectordrawing tools that can be used to add logos or other types of artwork to your images. The Quickshape feature works well, allowing you to quickly create standard shapes such as stars and spirals, and to adjust properties such as the radius of the spiral or the number of points in the star.

The program's text tools are fairly basic, lacking options such as vertical text, but one handy option is the ability to use text characters as selection areas. This allows you to quickly apply effects that conform to the shape of text, or cut out sections of an image directly beneath the text.

Photoplus has some useful options for creating web graphics. There are tools for slicing images, creating image maps and some useful animation tools as well. You can create a series of frames and edit each frame individually. You can also use many of the standard filter effects here, creating animated special effects in just seconds. Finally, there's the Export Optimiser dialogue box that lets you preview the effect of different compression settings, so you can quickly achieve the best results when saving gif or jpeg files for the web.

We also liked the printing options. You can print multiple images on a single sheet of paper and there's great freedom to create custom layouts that mix and match images of different shapes and sizes. The program's Image browser is rather disappointing, though. Like the Photoshop File browser, this allows you to search for and preview images stored on your hard disk. It's slow, however, and when you click on an image to open it, the image is placed behind the browser window so you can't see it clearly.

The many comparisons with Photoshop Elements might suggest that you'd be better off simply buying Elements. However, we do like Photoplus' animation and web graphics features, so it's a good choice if you have a leaning towards web design work.

Contact: Serif Europe 0115 914 2000
www.serif.com

System requirements:

• 200MHz processor
• Windows 98 or later
• 128MB Ram
• 130MB hard disk space

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