Serif PhotoPlus X4 review

As an affordable image editor, PhotoPlus X4 has stiff competition. Besides Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 8, it’s also rivalled in this price bracket by Corel’s Paint Shop Pro Photo X3.

Photoshop Elements has increasingly distinguished itself from its big brother by emphasising ease of use and creativity, offering users a polished package for organising their pictures and turning them into scrapbooks, greetings cards and web galleries. Paint Shop Pro, meanwhile, has turned towards photography, putting picture management right up front and offering functions like RAW processing and quick-fix editing tools to tempt the semi-pro snapper.

PhotoPlus, by contrast, continues to present itself as a general-purpose image editor. This can make it initially feel less friendly, and the Welcome screen isn’t actually very welcoming; but the How To panel, displayed beside the toolbox at the left by default, does a fair job of connecting the application’s features to the tasks users may have in mind. An overall tidy-up has made the user interface clearer and neater, but all the interface colour options (five variations on pale blue) feel dated compared to the dark grey look adopted by rivals.

Once you get to work, however, PhotoPlus quickly grows on you. It’s not hard to figure out where everything is, particularly if you’re familiar with Photoshop, and most operations are reasonably quick. Unlike with Photoshop Elements, you get full support for channels and paths as well as layers, so you can work properly with selections and masks, edit individual RGB channels, and draw vector clipping paths for cut-out images. The one big miss for professional users is CMYK editing, although this is becoming less of an issue as desktop publishing workflows move to RGB.

These features are complemented by Photoshop-like Adjustment Layers – now selected from a dedicated panel with customisable presets – and a full range of non-destructive edits applied via Filter Layers. It’s a more modern way of working that’s more demanding of memory and storage space but lets you tweak or reverse adjustments later rather than having them set in stone. If ready-made results are more your thing, the Filter Gallery has been expanded with an excellent range of customisable artistic effects, from Old Master to Watercolor.

One of Paint Shop Pro X3’s notable innovations was the Object Extractor, reminiscent of Adobe’s Extract (and Corel’s venerable KnockOut product for professional retouchers). PhotoPlus takes a different approach to the same task of cutting out objects from backgrounds with the new Image Cutout Studio. A sort of combination of Photoshop CS5’s Quick Selection and Refine Edge, it’s another tool that helps you get great results with reasonable effort rather than promising good-enough with a few clicks, again nudging PhotoPlus towards the semi-pro market.

Photographers aren’t forgotten: Raw Studio handles your DSLR shots, the Photo Fix mode gives you a stripped-down lab environment for retouch work, and there’s both an HDR tool and a bundled panorama-stitching app if you’re into the latest crazes. However, the relatively sparse raw processing features and the lack of clever extras that are starting to appear elsewhere, such as custom lens corrections and content-aware scaling, leave room for improvement.

The bundled AlbumPlus Organizer provides photo management, with geotagging but not face recognition, and a limited range of slideshow and print project options. It’s adequate, but not brilliant, not particularly well integrated with the main photo editing app, and slow to import RAW files.