silkstone
Feet under the table
Registered: January 2005
Location: Silkstone Common, Yorkshire, UK
Posts: 3754
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Review Date: Wed July 9, 2008
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Would you recommend the product? Yes |
Price you paid?: £50.00
| Rating: 7
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Pros:
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Plenty of features, easy to use, inexpensive
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Cons:
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Later versions have too many gimmicks - it has lost its way
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A few years ago I was an enthusiastic supporter of Paint Shop Pro, and looked forward to it evolving further into a full-blown competitor to Photoshop at a tenth of the price. It already did almost everything that the majority of photographers - even professionals - needed, and was quite intuitive to use.
Then disaster struck. PSP's developer, JASC, was taken over by Corel. Since then, very little has been added in terms of functionality, but there have been any number of 'one click' fixes and other gimmicks, plus an 'Organiser' instead of the conventional browser, which turned out to be a terrible resource hog with more bugs than a termite mound.
The last JASC version was PSP 9, and many people reckon that this is the best. You can still get it off eBay for a very low price. There's no 16-bit support or RAW conversion, but as a full-featured editor with everything from layers and scripts ('actions') to batch processing and full levels/curves support, it takes some beating.
The Corel versions - now labelled 'Paint Shop Pro Photo' are X, XI and X2. All the features of PSP 9 are still there, but buried in the menu system and more difficult to find. Fortunately you can configure the toolbar to add icons for the tools you use most, which gets over this to some extent. There is also some 16-bit support in the new versions, but it doesn't work for all the tools. RAW conversion is possible for some cameras, but is very slow and the results aren't impressive.
You can now choose between Organiser and Document mode for the browser, and it's worth checking on processor usage before making a decision.
Corel seems to have focused adding eye candy, wizards and quick fix features to PSP, rather than improving and extending the tools that most serious photographers want to use. They've clearly aimed it at the mass market rather than as a CS3 competitor.
It is still a good editor with most of the things you'd need, but by now it could have been even better. An opportunity has been missed.
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Willow5075
Been here a while
Registered: October 2007
Location: Adelaide, South Australia- best place in the world
Posts: 435
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Review Date: Fri July 25, 2008
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Would you recommend the product? Yes |
Price you paid?: None indicated
| Rating: 8
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Pros:
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value for money
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Cons:
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As a newcomer but old fan of PSP 5 (!) I have found many of it's features easy to use. I can usually pick up most Photoshop instructions and work out the equivalent on PSP.
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