Corel Paint. Shop Pro Review Rating. For many a Photoshop need, Corels photo software competitor, Paintshop Pro, will fill the bill just fine. It does, however, lack many of the Adobe flagships most advanced tools, such as 3. D modeling, typography, camera shake reduction, and face liquefy. And though Paint. Shops interface has improved over the years, it still cant quite match that of Photoshop for slickness. Paint Shop Pro Description. Paint Shop Pro PSP is a bitmap graphics editor and vector graphics editor for computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system. PaintShop Pro X6 is a good pick for anyone who wants more than a freeandeasy photo editor. Current owners, dont let the dearth of new features put you. Set the mood for your movies with one click add drama, irony, fun or illustrate the mystique of far away places. Get detailed information on Corels privacy policy. Photoshop Elements, Adobes consumer level photo editing software, is also simpler and slicker. But if youre not commited to team Adobe, and dont want to pay Photoshops required monthly subscription, Paint. Shop Pro is powerful and affordable tool thats well worth considering. Pricing and Starting Up. Paint. Shop Pro X9 is available directly from Corel for 7. The Ultimate edition 9. After. Shot Corels photo workflow app, Perfectly Clear an excellent automatic photo corrector, and Live Screen Capture for screen recording. The one shot pricing model may be a good fit for those who resent Adobes subscription only model for Photoshop. Lightroom, however, is still available for a one time payment, though that option is hard to find on Adobes site, and for the subscription price of 9. Photoshop and Lightroom. Photoshop Elements still carries a one time purchase price of 9. Paint. Shop Pro is even cheaper than that. Paint. Shop runs on Windows 7 through Windows 1. You first install a small downloader program that completes installation. When you install the application, it asks if you want 3. After this, I had to install an update immediately. Corel offers downloadable effect packs, too, such as Particle. Shop brushes and Color. Script color effects 1. I installed Paint. Shop Pro on my test PC, a 4. K touch screen Asus Zen Ai. O Pro Z2. 40. IC all in one PC. Most of the program is adapted just fine to 4. K monitors, but I still found some dialogs, such as the Effect Browser, that use tiny icons. Interface. From the moment you first run Corel Paint. Shop Pro 2. 01. 8, the Welcome screen shows its new Workspace options Essentials and Complete. The Workspace option joins the Welcome dialogs project templates, tutorials, and user image gallery. You can always get back to the Wecome screen from any other mode by tapping the big home icon. Paintshops templates are similar to the new Create dialog that appears when you first run Photoshop CC. Like Photoshops, Paintshops templates offer a smorgasbord of document types, including print sizes, mobile screens, and custom presets. One thing I didnt see, which Photoshop has, is a Clipboard choice, that sizes your new project to an image youve copied. A first run wizard helps familiarize you with the workspaces. Even after you dismiss the tutorial window, as in Lightroom, a series of dialog boxes take you through the interface components in a Guided Tour. Thats also a great help in getting you started. The interface is now very customizable as to color and the sized of elements such as icons and scroll bars. These options get their own main menu option, User Interface. The main windows side panels can be undocked or dismissed. The Essentials workspace is better suited to touch input, like that on my test machine, but its not quite as tuned to touch as Photoshop, which supports gestures like two finger twisting to rotate. When editing a photo, a slider lets you zoom in or out to any magnification you choose, unlike Lightroom, which restricts you to set ratios like 1 2, 1 3, and 1 1. There is a 1 1 button in Paint. Shop, however, and you can zoom in and out simply by spinning the mouse wheel. In the Complete workspace, there are just two modes Manage and Edit. Corel dropped Adjust, since that term isnt widely understood by photo hobbyists. Unlike Adobe Photoshop Elements, which has a separate Organizer app, you do everything in Paint. Shop in the same window, but you switch among the two modes for different functions. Within Manage you have subviews, like Maps and People Finder, and the first time you switch to a new mode, you get another tour. The program includes sample images, so youre not starting from zero. And if all thats not enough, the Edit mode still includes the right panel Learning Center, which helps with lots of image editing procedures. Manage. As its name suggests, this is where you organize your photo collection. Like Photoshop, Paint. Shop is not a photo workflow application, even though it includes tools for organizing and outputting. Its especially evident when importing photos because you dont get to preview or tag images on import. Theres no big Import button as you find in workflow apps such as Adobe Lightroom. I had no trouble importing raw camera files, though the newest models raw file format is usually supported earlier in Adobe Camera Raw than in Paint. Shop. After importing images, you can add star ratings, as well as tags for keywords, people, and places. You can also create collections, including Smart Collections of photos that meet specified criteria, such as date, name, or tags. Smart Collections let you specify criteria, such as text in the file name or image size to automatically create a Collection. On the left panel is source navigation, with folders and collections. In the center is your main content viewthumbnails, full image, or a map showing photo locations based on GPS data. You can double tap a thumb for a quick full screen preview with options for rating, rotating, deleting, or launching the image in the editor. Images arent overwritten when you save edits, but saved in Paint. Shops own PSP format. You can also save in Adobe PSD format, along with dozens of other standard image formats. Essentials Workspace. The new Essentials Workspace addresses one of my major beefs about Paint. Shopits cluttered interface. Not only is it drastically simplified while maintaining tools frequently needed, but you can also add or remove tools to suit your needs. There are still quite a number of menu choices along the top, 1. Photoshops 1. 1 and Photoshop Elements 1. Photoshop even lets you create custom workspaces and offers six options by default to Paint. Shops two. Elements has Quick, Guided, and Expert modes, which can be thought of as workspaces. New Crop Tool. The most commonly used photo editing tool by far is the crop tool. It may seem that theres nothing to it, but Adobe supercharged Photoshops crop tool, even adding AI powered auto suggested cropping now also found in Photoshop Elements. Corel has finally given attention to its own crop tool. Now it gives you a better idea of your final result by darkening the rest of the image. It also offers overlays for composition guides, including golden spiral, golden ratio, and rule of thirds. When you rotate with the tool, the crop box stays put while the image rotates, so you can see the result without tilting your head. These overlays are more than Elements offers, and that program rotates the crop box instead of the image. But Elements adds some cool cookie cutter crops like hearts and animal shapes, and Adobes editors feel more responsive and precisely controllable than Corels, probably thanks to graphics hardware acceleration. Basic Photo Correction. Though Adjust mode is gone, theres still an Adjust menu, which offers auto correction along with tools like a histogram with lighting and color controls. The One Step Photo Fix from this menu corrected lighting problems in many of my test photos. The Smart Photo Fix dialog gives you a lot more control. You can click a neutral spot to correct the white balance and use a Levels slider to balance a lopsided histogram. Smart Photo Fix also shows before and after views so you can see the results of your adjustments and edits. Theres also a Revert button at the bottom of the corrections panel There are certainly times when youve adjusted a photo excessively and just want to start over. Back and Forward buttons also help with this. Paint. Shops Effects menu goes leagues past the familiar Instagram choices, but it does offer Instant Effects that mimic those. The Time Machine tool lets you see how your photo would look if taken in 1. There are lots and lots of effectsArtistic, Film, B W, scene lighting. Clicking on an effect, shows a preview of the selected effect side by side with your original image. If the slew of effects isnt enough for you, you can download even more. One thing I didnt see, however, was Prisma style AI filters that turn your photos into Picassos.
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November 2017
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