DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY NEWS

Serif Announces Digital Photo Suite 2009

New suite makes easy work of managing, fixing, enhancing and sharing images

February 5, 2009 -- Serif is delighted to announce the release of a new title, Digital Photo Suite 2009.   Digital Photo Suite 2009 (List Price $39.99) makes it simple for everyone to organize, fix, enhance, and share their photos in exciting ways. This new release makes it easier than ever to give portrait photos a makeover, apply effects, create artwork, and easily upload photos and slideshows directly to well-known sharing sites. Combining the new AlbumPlus X3 with the popular PanoramaPlus 3, this suite offers users an unrivaled combination of features and value for money, allowing anyone to achieve fantastic digital image editing results.

Impressive Digital Photo Suite 2009 features and benefits include:

• Easy Organization
  Find images fast; create albums, tag with keywords, search and sort easily.
  
  
• Portrait Makeover Studio
  A one-stop shop to glamorise and enhance portrait subjects.
  
  
• QuickFix Studio
  Correct images fast; fix red-eye, adjust exposure, sharpen and much more.
  
  
• Instant Artist
  Transform images into stunning works of art in popular styles with a single click.
  
  
• Great Panoramas
  Automatic stitching of photos and movie footage into awesome panoramas.
  
  
• Share Online
  Send photos or slideshows directly to YouTube™, Facebook® and Flickr®.
  
  
• Print Projects
  Attractive calendars, postcards and more, featuring favourite photos.
  

Easy Organization
With AlbumPlus X3 at the heart of Digital Photo Suite 2009, it’s easier than ever for everyone to take control of their growing digital photo collections. Images can be added to albums, tagged with keywords to organise them by theme, subject, location, colour, event, rating – anything – at the click of a button, making them easy to search and sort. New multi-level sorting allows more fine tuning, so users are presented with just the images they’re looking for. Sorting by date includes yearly and monthly calendar views, displaying photos on the day they were taken, with clear indicators of how many photos are from a given time (or how many match a given tag). It will be easier than ever for users to find memories from special events without having to remember directories and filenames.

Portrait Makeover Studio
Transform portrait subjects, rolling back the years and making radiant, bright smiles with beautiful skin; the full magazine makeover but without the expensive art department! Digital Photo Suite 2009’s unique Makeover Studio is a one-stop-shop for enhancing portrait photos, with no previous image-fixing experience required. Simple-to-use tools and on-screen advice make it easy to whiten teeth, smooth skin, paint away blemishes, brighten eyes, do away with dark circles, and improve skin tone with a realistic tan.

QuickFix Studio
An amazing digital darkroom dedicated to making perfect images using automatic image correction and powerful fixing tools. Crop images to the desired shape to frame subjects or remove distractions, straighten horizons, adjust brightness and contrast, control highlights and shadows, alter colour cast, then sharpen and remove flash-photography red eye. No photographic or image fixing expertise is required – the dedicated tools are simple to use and there’s even built-in guidance on display to ensure users are never in the dark.

Instant Artist
Create stunning works or art from photos in popular styles with a single click! Turn favourite landscapes, abstracts and portraits into oil paintings, pencil sketches, stained glass, comic book drawings, watercolours, and emulate famous styles including impressionist, Munchist, pointillist, and expressionist paintings. Adjust controls like stroke length, level of detail and more to create unique and exceptional masterpieces, with on-screen advice to help get the best from the Studio.

Great Panoramas
Selected photos are automatically stitched into fantastic, seamless panoramas and placed in your album as stunning new images. Panoramas can be created from horizontal and vertical series of images, even from movie footage, and the results can be saved as high-quality images or QuickTime® Virtual Reality Movies for interactivity – an unprecedented level of power from such an affordable and easy-to-use suite!

Share Online
Whether users are already familiar with popular sharing and social networking sites, or simply after the easiest way to share their memories, Digital Photo Suite 2009 is the perfect way to show off individual images, whole collections, and photo slideshows. Uploading straight to YouTube™ means that compelling photo slideshow movies (including transitions and a music track) can be online and viewable from anywhere in the world in just minutes – no need to convert a movie into a suitable format and learn how to submit videos to the site. Similar direct uploads to popular Flickr® and Facebook® websites make it a breeze to get photos and collections online, with no prior experience necessary.

Print Design Projects
Hands-on ways of enjoying photos including regular photo printing and impressive print design projects are right at users’ fingertips. Professionally-designed calendars, postcards, greetings cards and photo albums are ready to be customized by simply dragging and dropping photos straight into the designs. Print to any printer for attractive, themed photo memories.

And there’s plenty more, too…
In addition to the headlines mentioned so far, Digital Photo Suite 2009 also offers this additional range of features and tools to help users get the most from a photo collection:

• Flash® Movies
  Save slideshows as Flash® movies for websites, or as WMV video files.
  
• Lossless Rotation
  Display and use rotated images at perfect quality, with no recompression.
  
• Flexible Album Views
  View albums, individual images, thumbnails on a calendar, or by folder.
  
• Backup Albums
  Backup treasured images to disc or external drive for total peace of mind.
  
• Optimize for Email
  Resize images for transmission by email and for sending to mobiles.
  
• Stylish Video Discs
  Create video discs featuring editable menus and animated backgrounds.
  
• Screensavers & Wallpaper
  Quickly set an image as the PC’s desktop background, or make a screensaver of favourite photos as a slideshow or montage.
  

“Serif is delighted to announce the launch of Digital Photo Suite 2009, which offers users of any level of experience the fastest and easiest way to fix, enhance, organise and share their photos”, said Gary Bates, Serif’s Managing Director. “As the collections of images stored on our computers grow at an ever-increasing rate, there’s no better time to dive in and start managing and enhancing photos, especially if you’ve been put off by the complexity of other photo editors in the past. Digital Photo Suite 2009 is the ideal, affordable way to create great-looking photos and share them with people the world over.”