I’ve been using Paint Shop for going on two decades. For fixing up family photos, graphic design for websites, and excursions in digital art, it has served me admirably. The latest Pro X4 Ultimate version continues a long tradition of maintaining usability while providing a robust feature set.
Favorite Features
What I like about Paint Shop Pro (PSP) is that it has been optimized for basic photo management and editing as well as more complex graphic design. Most functions fall under the main tabs: Manage, Adjust, and Edit. The photo management system uses a familiar album setup that is simple enough. I use it mainly because a few clicks bring up PSP’s impressive editing tools.
The one-click “photo fix” button has become a common feature in consumer photo editors, but I’ve yet to find one as good as Paint Shop’s. Most of the time this improves the brightness, contrast, and color balance of my photos enough that no further tweaking is necessary. For especially dark or blurry photos, the manual adjustment options are clearly labeled and have a before/after zoomable preview to help you get it right.
The Edit tab is home to features like filters and layers that you’d probably only use for graphic design. These are not merely tacked on; Paint Shop is a legitimate professional-grade tool that can do just about anything its more expensive competitors can. It remains my most-used editor for creating logos, digital art, and putting together website graphics.
How It Compares
Corel Paint Shop Pro X4 Ultimate retails for $59.99 directly from Corel.com, placing it in the same price category as the more popular Adobe Elements. The appropriate feature comparison, however, is with Elements’ big brother and industry standard Adobe Photoshop CS5.
I own and regularly use both PSP and Photoshop, but more often I use PSP. Photoshop certainly trumps Paint Shop in the sheer size of its user community as well as the variety of available tutorials and plugins. When I do fire up Photoshop, generally it’s to try out a Photoshop-only plugin for some special artistic effect. For the bulk of my work, including standard image effects, I stick to PSP. The tools are simply more intuitive, making for a gentle learning curve.
Final Thoughts
Paint Shop Pro runs on Windows 7, Vista, and XP. Corel recommends a 2 GHz processor and 2 GB RAM; I can run it on my older, low-end laptop just fine. This solidifies its cachet as the ideal “prosumer” choice of photo editor. Being priced at 90% less than the closest competitor doesn’t hurt either.