The newly-released PhotoPlus X2 Studio Pack (**** out of four) offers a professional-grade photo editor at an affordable price. The program provides new usability features to get novices started editing photos and also provides a wealth of in-depth tools to use as your skill levels increase or for more advanced users.

Further improvements in the Quick Fix Photo Studio feature place all the commonly-used editing tools in one menu, allowing you to set, change or apply any or all the following:

* Sharpness: controlling the amount of sharpening by using a slider bar.

* Greyscale: converting your color photo to black and white and even fine tune the red/green/blue color conversion emphasis. Add a color wash for sepia or other effect, if you want.

* Color: change white balance to compensate for daylight, indoor, fluorescent or other lighting; or manually adjust color warmth or coolness of your photo, its tint and amount of color saturation. For example, by simply de-saturating the color, you can get a beautiful hand-tinted effect.

* Brightness and Contrast: adjusting brightness and contrast in the whole photo or just lighten or darken highlight or shadow areas.

* Red Eye: zoom in on the red eye and use one-click removal.

* Crop: use freeform rectangular crop to crop to any size and aspect ratio, or use the constrained crop to limit the crop to a specific print size such as 6x4 or 5x7.

* Straighten: draw a line parallel to a tilted horizon, and the photo will automatically turn to level the line.

* Lens Vignette: adjusts the amount of edge vignetting for an old-fashioned or arty effect.

* Chromatic Aberration - adjustable subtle color fringe effects.

* Lens Distortion: adjust the degree of fish-eye or reverse fish-eye effect.

The best part is that these Quick Fixes are done, photos are displayed before and after and side by side, so you can quickly and easily see the change, make adjustments and check the result.

A cool new feature is the Makeover Studio that groups tools to fix and enhance portrait photos. You’ll love using this to smooth wrinkles, erase blemishes, whiten teeth, add sparkle to eyes and more--each with one-click ease or do the fixes manually.

A Filter Gallery Tool allows you to quickly apply a filter to your photos by choosing from the 50 available filters. These filters include blur, glowing edges, mosaic, dust and scratch remover, ripple and more; most provide control sliders that allow you to choose the amount of effect or menus to change parameters. An enhanced Instant Artist tool applies artistic effects to simulate oil, watercolor, old master, impressionist and other cool effects. The artistic effects seemed to work best for us on portraits. Text can be added to your photo, and several text effects are available, such as color gradients, patterns or shadows.

The main work screen provides a wealth of tools for photo editing. There are tabs for layers, which allow working on just part of an image without affecting the rest, histograms for adjusting overall brightness, history of changes made so you can revert to a previous appearance before changes were made, brushes to adjust thickness or sharpness of "painting" tools, color and the all-important "How To" tab that provides mini-help for Basics, Fixing Photos and Being Creative. A useful feature of the main screen is that you can select to have PhotoPlus X2 Studio Pack display thumbnail photos of open images along the bottom of the screen, making it easy to switch between images as you work.

Several printing options are available. The crop-to-print feature automatically crops a photo to the correct size for a specific sized paper. A set of templates makes it easy to drag and drop photos from the displayed thumbnails so you can print several various sized photos on one sheet of paper or make multiple copies of the same photo.

Features designed for the more advanced users include layers that now allow effects created on layers to be fully editable, and raw capture, allowing you to import the unprocessed image from your digital camera and do your own specialized processing. In addition, there are masking paths that permit working on part of an image without affecting the rest of the image, blended ranges and ICC color support. If your images are being professionally printed, the program supports color separations, crop marks and more.

Help comes in the form of a printed 180-page User Guide, on-screen Tool Tip balloons for the many tool icons and a complete on-screen help menu. We found this help menu informative and easy to use. In addition, there are tutorials dealing with Getting Started, Basics, Photography, Creative Effects and Projects (optional). Each has subheadings covering appropriate topics. For example, under Basics > Basic Image Corrections > Red Eye Removal you are provided with a sample image (in this case a baby with red eye), shown how to do the correction and then given a chance to try it yourself.

PhotoPlus X2 Studio Pack is a good photo editor and provides all the tools you may ever need--and then some. The program is one-click easy enough for a novice but still provides many features for the advanced user. Like any full-featured program, expect a learning curve for the more advanced features, but this is the time well spent. Recommended.