The latest version of Corel Paint Shop Pro is now apparently called PaintShop Photo Pro X3. Perhaps they’ll eventually regret their ridiculous naming.
Many things are the same since the previous version. The obvious differences are that the menus have been re-colored to be higher contrast. I find it overdone and a little garish, but not a big deal overall. To me the old version (figure right) is easier to read.
The single feature I wanted most from Photoshop’s line was the vibrancy adjustment. Unlike Photoshop, PaintShop includes the vibrancy adjustment as a standard image operation (accessible through Adjust –> Hue and Saturation –> Vibrancy). This is considerably superior to Photoshop, which only includes it in the RAW import tool. The vibrancy adjustment works on 8 bit/channel and 16 bit/channel images like many of PaintShop’s tools, in contrast to most of Photoshop Elements’. Corel could have done better though; I was disappointed that the vibrancy is not available as an adjustment layer.
Corel upgraded the photo organization tools some, and there are distinct improvements. Like Picasa and Elements, photos can be grouped virtually into “Collections”. Other software may call them albums. The organizer does a passable job of including the EXIF and IPTC data. Captions in Picasa show up in the “Description” IPTC field, rather than the “Caption” field, so moving between those two programs at least is a little bit of a pain.
The tag editor is quite disappointing, as it does not appear to have any method of making common tags easily accessible—which means typing “Angus Hays” for every picture that includes my dog Angus.
The “email picture” capability did not improve in any important way–it is still just tied to the Windows MAPI system. Fine if you’re brain damaged enough to use Outlook, but a complete failure for those of us in the Gmail crowd.
The upload tools for interfacing to web services appear to be part of a different application called “Corel PaintShop Photo Project Creator” which rolls off the tongue. CPSPPC seems to be worthless, as it only interfaces to Facebook, flickr, and YouTube. There is no option to add plugins or support for Picasa, MPIX, or any of the other services I use regularly. CPSPPC provides tools to make backups, photo books, uploads, order online (only from Corel’s affiliate, who is not named prior to upload, does not offer an ICC profile, etc.). Furthermore CPSPPC does not include any of the Photo Organizer’s tools for searching—all the albums you created in PSP Organizer are useless if you want to use them in, for example, a photo book. Unbelievable, the project manager must be a drooling moron.
Anyway, Picasa offers services like that which are orders of magnitude better than Corel’s or Adobe’s—it is really the photo editing tools that I care about. It is worthwhile to know that Corel is still ranked third in class on photo organization.
I wanted Corel to include an “Out of Gamut” display to help with color management, and that is sadly missing. They did not appear to have changed anything about their color management processing at all, it is still basically OK but not exactly mind blowing.