Serif PhotoPlus - Phot editing software review

Serif PhotoPlus 9.0 and 10.0 Review

Serif Plus is a great photo program. It supports many of the features of high end applications such as Adobe Photoshop. The cost is about $100 vs. several hundred dollars for some similar applications.

Version 9 now has file formats compatible with Photoshop's native PSD format. It also allows you to export to the Adobe PDF format. Other new features include

Auto correction
Scratch removal
Additional warping tools
Red eye removal
Dodge and burn (brings back memories of working in a darkroom)
ICC Color profile support.

In addition to the new tools, Photoplus includes the standard items such as

Layer support
Export optimizer (This works very well)
Various brushes
Instant artist effects (Pen and ink, oil, watercolor etc.)
Resizing
editing masks
blur and smudge
Full control over all color channels.
Animation
magnetic selection
and a whole lot more. . .

The application also supports many of the available Adobe Photoshop filter plug ins. That gives you an even wider range of manipulation and retouching options

Our experience:

The optimizer works very well for cutting down your file sizes.
Layers are supported
The text tool works very well for our needs

Tips

Serif runs a pretty good user support forum on their website. If you have any problems, look there for help.
Serif has to have one of the friendliest sales staff we've dealt with, especially the US office. (at certain time the phone will ring over to the UK office). They are more than willing to help.

Summary

A good reasonably priced photo manipulation application.

Update - August 2005. We just purchased and installed Photoplus 10. IT has some minor improvements but was worth the cost. We liked the ability to rotate in fractions of a degree and the improved color handling. Some of the improvements include:

macros for batch or bulk updates
Batch processing
A filter gallery to give you more control over filters and combinations of filters
Support for RAW files
Support for EXIF information (The information from the camera as to settings, time, date etc.)
Better layer management including layer groups.
More brushes including wet edges and charcoal.

We also have been playing with Photoshop Plugins that are available as freeware, shareware and commercial applications. In almost all of the cases, the filters built for Photoshop work with Photoplus

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