Serif PhotoPlus X2 Studio Pack review

PhotoPlus is one of a shrinking breed of image editing programs that appeals to two creative types at once: serious bitmap manipulators, who want power features, and home users, who need ease of use.

X2 continues this balancing act with impressive new features and better usability.

PhotoPlus X2's best new trick is filter layers, which let you apply filters to images non-destructively. Even Photoshop - at ten times the price -didn't get this feature until earlier in 2007.

To use non-destructive filters, you first convert a layer to a filter layer. This automatically opens the Filter Gallery, which houses plenty of corrective and creative filters, boosted by new comic book, vignette and texture effects. You can apply multiple filters to the same layer and drag them to reorganise. What distinguishes this method is that you can edit a filter's parameters later by double-clicking the layer to reopen the Gallery. That's very different from trying to undo the effect of a filter later and apply a different one.

It's a pity filters you apply aren't listed in the Layers palette; you can't see what filters have been applied without re-opening the Gallery. Nor can you hide individual filters in the palette to see how an image will look without a particular effect; again, it's a trip back to the Gallery. But we're perhaps being too critical when you remember no other program near this price offers this function.

Its usefulness is enhanced by a couple of other Gallery improvements. Thumbnail swatches next to a filter preview the active image with each effect applied, while a split-screen 'before and after' view shows how a selected filter will affect the underlying image. Serif also claims speed improvements in the Gallery, but you'll need plenty of memory in your PC to get the benefit of this.

New Blemish and Patch tools, to remove imperfections, give smoother results on skin tones than the existing Scratch Remover. A quirkier addition is the ability to add outlines to text, shapes or selections. We'd rather time had been spent improving the Extract tool; this is an important tool for cutting out areas of an image seamlessly, and we still struggle to get good results with it.

Fully automatic

PhotoPlus' under-appreciated batch editing tools now better those of its rival, Photoshop Elements. In X2, as in Elements, you can now resize multiple images to specific resolutions or to a set width or height. But by letting you embed your own recorded macros into the batch process, PhotoPlus provides almost limitless automation power. It's fast, too: we resized a folder of images, converting into another file format, in a couple of minutes. Also handy is the Tools Preset tab, which gives quick access to a tool as well as its stored settings.

Other features are intended to increase simplicity. An element of automation has been added to the How To tab, which guides you through common tasks. Several instructions have 'Do it for me' links that perform the described action, such as creating a layer or applying an effect.

If PhotoPlus misses a trick, it's failing to cater for digital photo enthusiasts. Support for Raw files from high-end cameras is improved, but unlike in Corel's Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 there's no support for HDR (high dynamic range) images. And although the image organiser, AlbumPlus SE Pro, is useful, letting you create slideshows, burn discs and so on, it's not as good as others. You can't create online galleries of the same quality as those from Photoshop Elements or even Google's Picasa.