Studioline Photo Classic 3 Plus review

Photo Classic 3 Plus is a photo-management program in the same vein as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Its image-editing tools are restricted to colour correction and a few basic creative effects, but they're offered alongside various features to manage large photo collections, such as sorting, keyword tagging and searching, web gallery creation, printing and backup. There's support for a range of Raw image formats, plus the ability to view and sort by photo EXIF data such as shutter speed and flash setting, which digital cameras embed into files.

Fast operation is crucial when working with a database of tens of thousands of photos, so we're glad to see Photo Classic Plus is quick to import images, catalogue their data and sort by complex search criteria. It's possible to find all photos with a particular keyword, an ISO speed below 400, and excluding those taken with a particular camera. The results often appear in a fraction of a second. The advanced search dialog box is jargon-heavy, but applying and searching by ratings and keywords only is also possible via a simpler, dedicated panel. Having to hold down Shift when selecting a keyword for it to have any effect seems confusing, though. A timeline view is great for finding photos based on a yearly or monthly calendar, although it's annoying that search results always default to Thumbnail View rather than our preferred Detail View.

The Image Toolbox includes some powerful colour-correction tools. Best of all, edits are applied non-destructively, leaving the original files unscathed. We're particularly pleased to see colour curve editing, a feature that's rarely included in low-cost software and is missing from Lightroom. However, in general the tone controls aren't as sophisticated or as effective as Lightroom's. Frustratingly, there are no on/off switches for individual filters, and it took us ages to work out how to permanently remove a filter from a photo.

Web galleries look attractive without being too fussy. The software can upload them to a website via FTP, and 100MB of online gallery space is available after registering the software. Uploads are easy, but the only way to delete a gallery from the server is to delete it from your computer. Still, this is a significant advantage over Lightroom, which doesn't include any online hosting. Printing options are the weakest part of the software, with just a few (mostly useless) templates and an awkward system for customising them and creating your own.

Photo Classic 3 Plus has all the features we would hope for, but its execution is often clumsy. Text-heavy pop-up boxes tend to get in the way, various features take a while to get to grips with and there are a few rough edges to the resulting output. Photoshop Lightroom is more polished and its colour-correction tools more effective. However, it's more expensive, too, and Photo Classic was discounted to £24 as we went to press. Still, we'd download the 30-day demo to see if you can live with its quirks before buying.

Author: Ben Pitt