Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo

3.0 stars

"If your image needs are undemanding, it's pretty good"

June 26, 2010  |   By kodabar

Version: Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI

Pros

Got a few photos you want to edit? Need to add a few spot effects or make minor repairs? Then PSP is pretty good. I've been using it off and on since version 3 and it's perfectly adequate for most people's image editing needs.

Cons

It's expensive for what it is. There are plenty of free image editors out there that are almost as good. It's not a professional tool (although many inexperienced users may think it is). Corel hardly bother to update it and it's getting quite buggy.

Summary

Way back when PSP was owned by JASC, it was pretty good. It was light, fast and stable. How I miss those days.

These days, PSP is owned by Corel and that's not a good thing. Version 9 was produced by the old owners, JASC, and since Corel took over, PSP is pretty much unchanged. They've added pointless gimmicks to it like the IR film simulator and the Blemish Remover; neither of which work well and they've played around with the interface a bit (especially in X3), but there's really nothing new in each version. About the most significant addition has been the image browser/organiser. But that's just a half-hearted response to Adobe Lightroom and doesn't work terribly well.

Worst of all, PSP now has quite a few bugs. It's got a tendency to freeze up and crash, especially if you're using quite a few images. A lot of the new tools are one-click gimmicks that are of little practical use and PSP is getting fat. The download is almost half a gigabyte and I can't see why.

If you've got version 9 or above, then there's no point in upgrading to X3 - you won't notice the difference. If you've got a version below 9, you may want to think about upgrading, but bear in mind that the large bugs introduced in X2 took a year to be fixed and (at the time of writing) X3 is only about six months old.

I used to use PSP in tandem with Photoshop. When I wanted to do some quick image conversions or basic corrections, PSP beat Photoshop quite comfortably. These days, it's trying too hard to actually be Photoshop and it's faily miserably.

If you want to do some basic photo editing and image correction, there are hundreds of image editors out there. Some of them are a lot better than PSP these days and many are free. You might want to save your money and try one of those.

In short, PSP is still quite good, but it's getting increasingly bloated and bug-ridden. Corel may lable each release as a new version, but there haven't been any significant upgrades since version 9.

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