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Digital camera use has taken off in a big way and consequently many folks have hundreds of photos stored on CD-Rs, nestling on hard disks or on memory cards but don't do much with them.
One of the most popular next steps for the enthusistic photographer is to do some basic photo-editing and file the results away neatly. There is a plenty of software for doing all this and Serif hopes that its value three-in-one package might tempt both novices and the budget conscious.
The Digital Camera Suite offers MediaPlus for organising images (and other media clips), PhotoPlus 6 for editing and manipulating images and MontagePlus, a photo-mosiac tool, for £50.
Dealing with the last first, it is reasonable to view MontagePlus as simply a bit of fun. It creates a single, large image from a collection of smaller thumbnails of other images. You choose the main image from your collection, select a group from which the thumbnails will be chosen, then watch the montage being automatically created. You can save and print montages, and that's about it.
PhotoPlus 6 is a reasonably featured, budget image-editing suite. It is actually two versions older than the current version of PhotoPlus, and it does show its age from time to time.
It includes various retouching features to prepare digital images for printing and a range of fun effects from a pretty standard stable including blurring, distorting and lighting effects. You can draw on and edit images in various ways, and twiddle with them so they are suitable for use on web pages, creating GIF-based animations, buttons, sliced images and image maps.
We were impressed by the optimisation tool, which lets you preview up to four versions of an image in different file formats and qualities before choosing to save an image as one in particular. Users can experiment quite happily with PhotoPlus 6, but at a level suited to beginners rather than advanced ones.
The final part of the package is MediaPlus, which provides the tools to organise all your media files. In addition to its basic facility of allowing annotation of individual images and sorting them into albums for use on your computer, it can create slideshows, save images as wallpaper, create screensavers and produce image collections for uploading to the web.
None of what is provided is particularly innovative but there are some very neat features which make MediaPlus appealing, such as the ability to change the layout of the interface to make best use of your monitor space and the ability to change the size of all the thumbnails on screen with a single click.
We also liked the utility for gathering media from the web. You give it a URL, set some parameters as to the type of media to look for, and it will automatically grab graphics and slot them into a folder. Harvesting copyright-free images for use offline has never been easier than this.
Serif Digital Camera Suite is certainly not a professional suite of tools, but it does provide enough for newcomers to digital imaging to get started with. The printed manuals are well suited to newcomers too, being clearly written and offering explanations of digital imaging jargon.
You might play with MontagePlus a few times and outgrow PhotoPlus 6 over time, but the star performer, MediaPlus, could well find a permanent spot on your hard disk.
DETAILS
Price: £50
Contact: Serif 0800 376 7070
www.serif.com
See also:
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Draw, Photo Paint and Rave have all been revamped, but is it too little too late? 12 Sep 2002
Paint Shop Pro's little brother is very affordable and crammed with useful features. 11 Jul 2002All Image Editing & Management
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