Serif Photoplus X3

Serif has christened version 11 of its image-editing software Photoplus X3.

This could be an effort to go one better than Corel’s Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, or perhaps Serif simply felt it sounded less prosaic.

The name is not the only change, of course. This release adds support for Camera Raw images, High Dynamic Range (HDR) merging, support for 16-bit-per-channel images and some new effects.

These additions expand on an already comprehensive suite of existing tools and features that places Photoplus X3 squarely in the realm of the serious photographer.

The Layers palette often provides a good indication of a photo editor’s capabilities and this one allows you to add new layers and organise them into groups, independently lock their transparency, pixels and position, adjust their opacity and blend modes plus add adjustment layers, layer masks, layer effects and depth maps (otherwise known as displacement maps).

In a tabbed group within the Layers palette you’ll also find a Channels palette, vector paths and a macros palette ­ X3 supports recording and playback of macros as well as batch processing.

X3 does a good job of making these advanced features and other editing tools accessible to beginners or anyone unfamiliar with the program. There’s a Quickfix Studio window that provides a range of image adjustments and effects including white balance, brightness and contrast, cropping, red-eye and blemish removal, noise reduction and sharpen tools, in a single location. The only complaint here was that it didn’t seem to work with 16-bit images.

There’s also a How To panel, which provides guided help for a range of editing activities broadly categorised into Getting Started, Image Adjustments, Retouching, Makeover Studio, Black and White Studio, Creative Effects and Photo Finishing. This has been well thought out and implemented.

Any editing application that aims to attract serious hobbyists has to offer support for Camera Raw formats. The Photoplus X3 documentation doesn’t say which Raw formats are supported, though the open dialogue box now specifies CRW, CR2, ORF and NEF, that includes Canon, Olympus and Nikon and we were also able to open Adobe DNG files.

The Raw Studio importer provides a good set of conversion controls including white balance, exposure, highlight recovery, noise reduction and chromatic aberration. You can export files with either eight or 16 bits per channel, tagged with a colour space profile. It doesn’t offer the sophistication of more expensive Raw converters but nonetheless does a great job.

High Dynamic Range (HDR) tools, which produce a composite image from a set of bracketed exposures, are becoming common in photo applications, but both ease of use and quality of results have been lacking; X3 manages to score well in both these areas.

Using HDR Merge we imported six 16-bit TIFFs and produced an excellent tone-mapped composite image in a matter of seconds. The HDR merge controls include a local contrast radius slider, which helps to overcome the flatness problem typical in HDR images, and colour temperature and saturation controls to save you having to make these adjustments subsequently. You can then save images as eight- or 16-bit tone-mapped files or in EXR or HDP formats.

Photoplus X3 is up there with Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 in its ability to cater for digital photographers of all levels.