Corel Paint Shop Pro X

We freely admit that the high end image editing suites like Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro intimidate the hell out of us. As digital imaging has grown commonplace, the feature sets in these programs have gone ballistic and can make it very difficult to do the most common image-correction tasks. Please, don’t get us started on how to figure out “layers.”

The venerable Paint Shop marks its milestone tenth version by trying to dumb things down for novices, while retaining its remarkable depth. The Learning Center greets newbies with clear walkthroughs of all of the basics of photo capturing, adjusting, cropping for best print sizes, and effects applications.

Kudos to Corel for bringing to the surface the basic digital photographers’ tasks so that we don’t have to drill through cascading menus of terms and applications we can’t even identify let alone use. When the Learning Center is open on the left side of the screen, it describes most of the paint and adjustment functions you click on in numerous toolbars.

New tools are provided for auto-adjusting image quality that work fairly well and even allow you to tweak the adjustments manually. A new suite of facial makeover effects smooths away facial wrinkles, targets zits and blemishes, and whitens teeth for a cleaner look. These tricks worked quite well, and made our teenage daughter particularly happy.

This is not to say that everything is simple. Basic red-eye removal is more obtuse and complicated than it needs to be, and once you get out of the Learning Center, Paint Shop Pro X is almost as cluttered with strange imaging terms as the truly daunting Adobe Photoshop.

The advanced user does get new options for converting to black and white and to match screen color with print results. The real selling point of this new edition is the hand holding for novices. Corel has gone some distance in making an overstuffed imaging program more accessible and giving aspiring photographers a fighting chance to ease into the intricacies of advanced digital effects processing.
www.corel.com