The Bottom Line
Paint Shop Pro Photo offers a great deal of flexibility with features that rival much pricier photo editors. It's affordable and offers ease of use without being overly simplistic or limiting. The last few releases have added new features to help new users get started easier, and to expand the digital photography capabilities of the software. Aside from the long-awaited layer styles feature and stability improvements, veteran users might not find much to get excited about with this version. Still, Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 is a great buy for anyone just getting into digital photography and image editing.
Pros
- Affordable, yet full-featured and flexible; offers a nice mix of fun and serious tools.
- Combines photo editing, retouching, painting, drawing, and image management into one package.
- Learning Center and training videos help new users learn the software and accomplish common tasks.
- New layer styles for editable effects including reflections, glows, bevels, shadows, and embossing.
- Includes Corel MediaOne Plus via download.
Cons
- Dialogs and tool options tend to be crowded and often confusing.
- Start-up time and performance can be slow.
- Some of the new tools are gimmicky and unnecessary (thinify, visible watermark, eye drop).
- Animation Shop is no longer included or integrated, though you can still save to its format.
Description
- Paint Shop Pro Photo is an affordable yet flexible and powerful photo editor and graphic design tool.
- Includes a new photo organizer and Corel MediaOne Plus for showcasing and sharing photos.
- Photo enhancement tools for correcting color and tone, red eye, noise, and other common problems.
- Draw and paint with gradients, textures, and patterns in vector, raster, and art media layers.
- A mix of fun and serious tools; hundreds of special effects, distortion tools, frames, and quick fixes.
- Integrated photo organizer, screen capture, optimizer, multiple image printing, batch processing.
- Includes Web tools for image slicing, image mapping, and coding image rollovers and buttons.
- Customize toolbars, save personalized workspaces, save effects presets and share them with others.
- Record automated scripts that can be replayed and shared; batch process, rename and convert images.
- For Windows XP or Windows Vista.
Guide Review - Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 for Windows
Paint Shop Pro has often been lauded as an affordable Photoshop alternative. In the past I didn't feel it measured up, but with each new version, it has become more mature and refined. While some of the new features were a matter of catching up to the competition, Paint Shop Pro has always had a nice set of unique features--picture tubes, screen capture, and tons of special effects.
New features in Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 include:
- Express Lab, a streamlined user interface for working with common quick fix tools for photos.
- Graphite Workspace, a dark color scheme that better showcases your photos. The standard color scheme is still an option.
- HDR Photo Merge, for combining bracketed shots using different exposures to create a high-contrast image.
- Layer Styles, for creating editable shadows, reflections, inner and outer glows, bevels, and embossing effects.
- Visible Watermarks, for placing a copyright symbol or logo onto an image.
- Auto-Preserve Originals, which creates a copy of the original photo when edits are saved.
- Crop As New Image, for cropping scans of multiple images into separate files.
- New Makeover Tools, for making people look thinner, and clearing up bloodshot eyes.
- And a few more enhancements.
Although many of the new features work well, I find some of them gimmicky and unnecessary, as the functions they perform can already be done with existing tools. And the much anticipated layer styles feature was a bit of a let-down in the variety of styles that can be achieved.
If you're already using a recent version of Paint Shop Pro, there's not a whole lot to get excited about; but for new users needing a photo editor for home or business use, Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 offers low cost, ease of use, powerful tools, and plenty of flexibility.
Note: In Sept. 2008, Corel re-released Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 in an Ultimate Edition.
