Review by Derek G

Unfortunately, Corel has not yet learned the lessons of consumer behavior these past couple of years. If you want a program with a flashy installation screen, transparent splash screens, 2.3GB of hard drive space taken up and a whopping 32,443 items added to your registry then this is your program. It’s no wonder the system requirements are so steep. As a CD and DVD burner, I see little difference between this and the many other programs out there (including freeware). Its DVD player is fine, but frankly I already have one. The video studio has no real outstanding features that are better than any other cut and paste video program except maybe the ability to add soundtracks and voiceovers. It’s almost embarrassing to have only four different animated titles available and the fourth can’t possibly be used for anything other than baby photos. Seriously, four only?nnHelp is only located online and the instructions they give are very simplistic with a very small index. I don’t see a link to where you can ask questions either. It’s not really a studio, just four different programs. This becomes evident when the icons appear on your desktop along with a gadget to open the programs just in case you weren’t smart enough to double-click the icons. Of course you were never asked permission during installation. Corel also reassigns all the media files (movies, music, and photos) you used to play on Windows Media Player, your photo viewer or whatever you were using to Corel’s programs without your permission too! I call all this stuff vomitware. Wake up Corel!nnOut of all of the programs I used, the only one I found useful was the photo-editing program. The blemish removal and the suntan tool are useful, although the fake suntan could get red and blotchy if not used properly. The red eye tool is supposed to work on pets too but I didn’t find this to be the case. The straighten tool seemed to chop up the photo more than straighten it. The fine tune tool (aka the quick fix) brightened up pictures and made some of the old black and white photos I was restoring look really nice. Strangely it made color photos look too bright and a little over saturated. In short, it’s fun for beginners to play around with but it’s certainly not professional quality. You get a whopping six edges and seventeen frames for your photos in this program. It’s basic, but it is easy to learn and it may save you time over competing photo editors.

Personally I would look around for a program with lesser system requirements and more features, especially since Corel needs to get more options in the features they already have.