Review by Daviangel

The first impression I got from the start wasn’t good. I felt like giving it 0 stars for how must time I spent trying to activate it. It came with a very long code printed on the sleeve of the DVD it came with but every time I tried to enter it in the program it kept telling me the code was invalid! Only after searching Corel’s support website did I find a document dedicated just to this since it must confound quite a number of their customers. The problem was they print their V’s right up next to each other so what I kept typing in was a W instead of 2 V’s!!! Only good thing about that is that I found out the DVD contains both the 32-bit and 64-bit version of the program. I’m glad I got it all straightened out because this really is a fun program to use.nIf you ever used Photoshop Elements or Lightroom a lot of things will look familiar and work similarly to those programs. For example, it opens up to a manage tab where you can see all your photographs as thumbnails and manage them by rating them or creating you own smart collections. It automatically creates collections from photos in your pictures folder based on date, tags, people, places and ratings. Then there is the adjust tab that lets you apply instant effects like artistic pencil, charcoal, black and white 10 different versions, retro several versions also, portrait that includes vignette, soft focus, infrared, smart photo fix, soft focus 1 and 2, skin smoothing, and various others. It’d be nice if it let you import your own custom effects from Painter but if you can I haven’t figured it out. There is an option for user defined in the menu and an options button next to the effect but when you click on them they don’t seem to do anything though. You also have your basic quick editing tools you’ll find in any decent program like crop, straighten, red eye, clone brush, and makeover tool. The makeover tool is cool and something you usually won’t find in Photoshop or other free programs since it includes several tools inside like thinify to make people skinny, suntan to darken people’s skin, toothbrush to whiten teen, eye drop to whiten eyes and finally blemish fixer. They seemed to work pretty good and easier and faster than I have seen in other programs. The suntan tool for example you just brush over the person’s face other parts of the skin and it automatically detects the edges so you don’t have to be careful about darkening areas outside the face. Same with toothbrush, thinify, intuitive and very easy to use. Then underneath that is a button smart photo fix that will automatically try to correct brightness, shadows, highlights, saturation based on the histogram. If you don’t like what it suggest you can manually correct using sliders that go from -100 to 100 or enter a number in a box. Then below that follow sections for white balance, brightness/contrast, fill light, clarity, vibrancy, local tone mapping, high pass sharpen, digital noise removal.nFinally, if you can’t find what your looking for in the second adjust tab there is the final full edit tab similar to develop in Lightroom or full edit mode in Photoshop Elements. This is where you have total control over layers, adjustment layers, mask layers, layer styles, basically most of what you would find in an expensive program like Photoshop. This is also where you’ll find the most popular features promoted for this program which are Magic Fill and Magic Move. Magic Fill pretty much lets you remove unwanted elements in your pic. Just make a selection around it and the tool will do the work for you and remove it. Magic Move is even more impressive in that it will move something you select to anywhere else in your photo. In practice I found that it only really worked on simple scenes without a lot of complex detail. For example, move a bird person on a sand beach somewhere else and does great job since uniform background. Try to move person in busy street, signs or buildings in background and you end up with jumbled mess and will have to manually tweak the result!nEven though it can be an overwhelming program with so many features for someone that’s never used anything more complex than iPhoto, MS Paint, or Picasa it does come with a wizard of sorts like Photoshop Elements called Learning Center that walks you through the steps to accomplish a task. It can be found on the right side of the screen on the Edit tab and there are various sections like Get Photos, Quick Adjustments, Retouch and Restore, Layers and Selections, Text and Graphics, Effects, Advanced Adjustments, Print and Share. Some of them like Time Machine even pop up a second window that shows a preview of what the effect will look like with before and after photos which is really cool (See attached pictures). It even explains what the different types of photos are like Albumen, Cyanotype, Platinum and the time period they were used. After that some others that really impressed me and I had never seen before in a program are Perspective Correction, Single RAW Photo, HDR Merge (although I think Lightroom finally has it in latest version), and Depth of Field (I think new versions of Photoshop Elements also have DOF tool now but I have an older version so don’t know). Depth of Field is really cool because you can quickly select an object and blur the background without having to use an expensive lens that provides great bokeh out of the camera or for something like an iPhone that isn’t even capable of doing it. Basically, a lot of these neat features are things that could’ve been done straight out of the camera but weren’t for some reason or the other and hence the need for programs like this. Finally, for power users you can script all you actions and then use them to batch process a bunch of photos at once!nnSo in conclusion as you can see you definitely get a large amount of useful features for you money. I’ll continue to use this program on my Windows machine since it has a lot of good stuff and some stuff Photoshop Elements, Picasa, Photoshop (the other Photo programs I use on my Windows machine. I use iPhoto, PE, and Photoshop on my Apple computer) are missing or is harder to accomplish certain tasks like skin smoothing which it does better job than other programs, HDR features, Depth of Field and perspective tools. Unfortunately this program isn’t even an option for Mac users and so will have to stick with iPhoto/Llightroom since the new Photos program from Apple is so terrible.