PhotoPlus X2 Digital Studio

Great product! It takes a little time to get accustomed to the software; however I believe the product will meet my needs.

I bought this product with the hope that I could create neat family photos. It turns out that this program is not user friendly. It doesn't explain the "How to's" and it's very time consuming to try to figure out. I would consider myself computer savvy- and this is hard to figure out.

The Serif photo editing software works somewhat, at least, & I rate it as "fair" with two stars. While the software itself does seem to work, the tutorials do not, and although you can manipulate photo's somewhat, it is not anything near what is needed for web work. The tools needed to attach transparency to a cropped image background is not compatable with most other web editing software and thus the image always has a background of some color or another.Not very effective for web work. At best it is a photo retouch program with limited compatability. For that I give it two stars, and rate it as fair.

It is the 3 ft length I wanted and it is fine product but wondering why there was no other color choices. I go to the backwoods for walk and I carry it all the time. For it is not just an ice-ax multiple tool in a sense.

I don't know why these first versions are so well done - and the following versions just add more stuff - this works very well - and I still use it occasionally - although I have X5 on my computer as well.

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:Basic 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.)The 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:The 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.

Not easy to use! I still have it in my computer, but not using it. It has many faetures, which are for average person useless, but missing many basic features frequently needed! Cropp and cut and others. I have a Vista Home Premium 64 bits and no problems there.

I am disappointed in this software because it is just as complicated as Photoshop or maybe it's just me, it is confusing to me.