Although it's often billed as a low-budget Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro has some features not found in Adobe's higher-priced software. For novice and enthusiast photographers who want satisfactory editing features without paying a premium, Corel's Paint Shop Pro may be the better choice. Although we use Photoshop almost daily for graphic design jobs, we would consider using Corel Paint Shop Pro 9.0 to tweak our digital photos. If you are looking for a capable image editor with a modest price tag, we highly recommend it.
Version 9.0 of Corel Paint Shop Pro adds some convenient tricks to help maximise the main work space, such as roll-away palettes and the ability to minimise open images to tabs. The most important interface addition is the new History palette, which tracks the actions you perform on the active image. The palette lets you undo and redo commands, making it easy to experiment. Unlike in Photoshop, you can undo a single command without affecting any subsequent entries in the list. What's more, the entire history can be exported to a script and subsequently applied to other images.
Also new is the Mixer palette, which emulates the colour-mixing mechanics of a real brush and palette. Add dabs of colour to the palette surface, swirl them around, and select the exact colour you want. The palette was designed to work with Corel's new natural media tools, simulating the tactile experience of analog art without the messy cleanup.
Features
Corel Paint Shop Pro's photo-correction features are among its greatest strengths, containing noteworthy touches you won't find elsewhere. For example, the Automatic Color Balance filter has a slider to adjust for lighting temperature: incandescent, fluorescent, daylight, or anything in between. You can process your photos manually or take advantage of the automatic commands in the Enhance Photo menu. Photographers who use raw formats (unprocessed data from your camera's CCD) will be happy to learn that Paint Shop Pro 9.0 can preprocess and open these images.
Paint Shop Pro has several filters for correcting various lens distortions -- barrel, fish-eye, and pincushion -- plus a chromatic aberration filter for removing the coloured fringing often seen on sharply contrasting edges. The excellent noise-removal tool gave us better results than any comparable tool we've seen in an image-editing program to date. Also, Paint Shop's Clarify filter improved murky underwater pictures. In addition, each filter shows a large preview window so that you can fiddle with pertinent adjustment settings.
On the downside, Paint Shop's Flash Fill and Backlighting filters, meant to correct under- and overexposed areas (respectively) in your digital images, were disappointing. There just weren't enough controls to make these filters work well; Photoshop still triumphs in the exposure correction department.
Although Paint Shop Pro isn't going to replace Corel Painter any time soon, the program's new Art Media tools are fun to use. The new Mixer palette lets you experiment with paper textures and blended colours, and the brushes themselves -- chalk, pastel, crayon, oil, and marker -- work fairly well; however, taking full advantage of the Art Media tools requires a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet. (Wacom is the gold standard here.) The tools were moderately responsive and suitable for adding realistic artwork to our image. However, if you are serious about art media, we suggest that you upgrade to Corel Painter.
Paint Shop Pro doesn't begin and end with image editing; there are a few tools for creating such vector graphics as lines, shapes, and text. These features can come in handy when you need a few lines, boxes, or stars to enhance your photo. If you need to make quick Web buttons, Paint Shop also has the ability to create image maps, rollover buttons, and image slices.
The Corel Web site offers 24-hour online support and hosts extensive newsgroups where you can ask questions and hopefully get answers from other users. In addition, Paint Shop Pro's manual is outstanding. It includes detailed explanations for every tool, plus informative sidebars and tidbits that will help you better understand the program and image editing in general.
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calmax14
03/12/2007, 04:13 AM
rating
6/10
Could someone send me a evaluation of Paint Shop Pro
Pros: yes
Cons: no
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sara
26/11/2006, 01:28 PM
rating
10/10
great work
Pros: perfect paint shop
Cons: not shore !!
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jimbob jones
20/09/2005, 03:29 PM
no good at all
this is no where near its little brother paint shop pro 8 it is way to hard to use and some of the stuff is useless
it has crashed on me a couple of times and it is really slow
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Rana
27/05/2005, 04:44 AM
Brilliant
A definite YES.
This is fanastic value for money. Easy to learn to.
Move over Photoshop.
You can achieve 98% of what you can achieve in PS CS with Paint Shop Pro 9, for a fraction of the price.
Long may it be so.
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