Review by Chawks

PhotoPlus X2 is a very good photo editor. It is operates in a similar manner to Photoshop in many aspects though it is not as powerful as CS3 or CS4.

PhotoPlus X2 is similar in features and power to Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate. Both programs are more powerful than Photoshop Elements versions 6 or 7. An additional bonus of PhotoPlus X2 not offered with Paint Shop Pro is compatibility with 3rd party Photoshop plugins.

Pros:nnBasic editing such as color adjustment, sharpening, lens filters, cloning etc are easy to find and use.

Photo resizing is excellent - the best that I have seen! (I am referring to taking a small photo and doubling it in size. Most programs leave the photo in a fuzzy condition. PhotoPlus X2 somehow doubles the photos with less fuzziness.)nnThe lens vignette function is really a nice feature to have. If you use a polarized filter, often times the sky on one side of the photo will be much darker than the other side. The lens vignette function largely eliminates this problem.

Cons:nnThe sharpen slider in the Quickfix studio works in chunks rather than in a linear fashion - 0,50 etc. You must type in a sharpen amount in the box next to the slider and then sharpen in a linear fashion - 28,29,30,31 etc. Serif verified this bug in Sept 08.

The makeover studio requires several steps similar to Adobe Photoshop - creation of editing masks. Paintshop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate thankfully does not require the creation of masks to do makeover tasks.

All in all an excellent photo editor that will generally run quite nicely on older hardware - Pentium 4, 3ghz with 3gb of ram.