Review: Serif Home Creativity Suite

Priced at just under £30, Serif's Home Creativity Suite houses two of its flagship products, Pageplus and Photoplus.

With both titles currently selling at a combined price of £160, this appears to be astounding value for money. However, as with previous Home Creativity Suite releases, both titles are old versions.

While Pageplus currently sits at version 11, version 9 (released late 2003) is included in this suite. Similarly, Photoplus 9 (released January 2004) is favoured over the current version 10.

This five CD collection includes the two program discs each with their own resource CD. The final CD is home to Hemera Photo Objects 3000 but, rather bizarrely, the same content is also found on the Photoplus resource CD.

Pageplus 9 appears to have stood the test of time reasonably well. While most of the templates are aimed at the home, professional results are well within reach.

Whether starting from scratch or using one of the many templates, creating documents using Pageplus is no problem at all and the resource CD holds 1,800 templates for you to pick and choose from.

Output is also very flexible. As well as being able to create pdfs, Pageplus is also able to publish direct to the web.

For more information on version 9 of Pageplus, read our original review.

Getting quality images into a document is important, especially if you're looking to publish your work on the Internet, so the inclusion of Photoplus 9 is a good move.

It's similar in many ways to Adobe's Photoshop Elements and features a good selection of tools for touching up photos or creating images from scratch.

As we concluded in our Pageplus 9 review back in 2004, it's a powerful image editor but lacks a wide range of artistic effects and has a relatively poor file browser - especially by today's standards.

Thanks to the metadata included, searching for pictures to use with your documents using Hemera Photo Objects 3000, housed on the final CD, is a simple process.

The included versions of Pageplus and Photoplus might both be over two years old, but if you're not fussed about losing out on the latest features, it's a good value for money package.

System requirements:
Pentium processor
64MB of Ram
Windows 98 or higher

See also:

Buyers' Guide: Video-Editing Software

There's quite a bit to consider when purchasing video-editing software. We give you a helping hand  15 Feb 2006

Buyers' Guide: Digital Image-Editing Software

We point out what to look for when shopping for image editing software  05 Jan 2006

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