What's Hot: Now let’s take a look at the interface. When PhotoPlus is first opened, you are presented with a large workspace in the center of the application that is surrounded by the tools and the rest of the interface. At the top of the screen are the usual menu items, along with icon for various editing and other tasks.
In a narrow toolbar along the left of the work area are the icons for all of the different editing tools. You will find tools for cropping, moving, meshing, and warping the images. You will also find selection tools for selecting areas of your image, as well as the different brushes, cloning tools, and color fill tools. Most of these tool icons have little drop-down arrows that will open up fly-out menus that allow you to select or fine-tune how the tool works. There is a context-sensitive series of buttons at the top of the working area that change based on the tool that you have selected.
There is another stacked and tabbed set of tools to the right of the work area. At the top is a series of tabs for color selection and adjustment, swatches, brushes, and instant effects. Below that, in the middle, is a set of tabs for text input, histogram, history, and navigation. At the bottom is another set of tabs for “how to.” I was really impressed with the history tab as it shows a list of all the changes you've made to an image and allows you to go back to previous versions of your changes. The histogram was also very impressive, showing statistics as well as allowing you the option to display the RGB channel, the separate color channels, or the luminance histogram. About the only thing I found missing was a curves option that would allow me to drag them to adjust the image.
To edit an image, you open the Image Browser from the File menu. The Image Browser looks a lot like Windows Explorer, with a directory tree on the left and a thumbnail view of your images on the right. You can open an image in the main edit window by simply double-clicking the image or by right-clicking and choosing Open. Right-clicking also gives you a menu option to view the image's information. Here, I would like to see the EXIF information for the image, but unfortunately that isn’t an option that I could find anywhere. I was also a little disappointed that the Image Browser always wants to stay on top of the main editing window. You have to close it, minimize it, or move it to another monitor (if you arerunning dual monitors, as I am). I should note that you can still edit the underlying image while the Image Browser is open, so it is no real big deal, but I still wish it behaved better.
You can open multiple images for editing using the Image Browser. When you do this, you get multiple image windows in the editing window and PhotoPlus 11 adds them to a document bar at the bottom of the screen.
The QuickFix studio opens the image in a separate window that allows you to do all of the common stuff such as fix red eye, straighten, crop, and adjust brightness or contrast. It even allows you to adjust highlights and shadow areas separately. All of this is done by simply dragging markers along a horizontal line. It also allows you to view the before and after images so that you can see the effects of your changes. It even allows you to select how the before and after images appear--stacked or side by side--and it allows you to zoom in on the images to check your changes. When I made changes the results were shown almost immediately. No delays or sluggishness were encountered. As for running my standard series of test images, I didn’t have any problems as it handle all of the tasks that I tried without any problems or resorting to use of the help files. It handled all of my test images with
