Review by David Stapleton

I’ve been a PaintShop user from way back when it was a JASC product. It has always been the less expensive alternative to Photoshop with much of the functionality. I have had mixed feelings about the Corel versions as they tend to be slower loading with a fairly large system footprint and in the more recent versions almost as cumbersome and confusing as Photoshop.

This current offering continues to suffer from those flaws (but only enough to cost them one star in the rating) though still offering the features that I have always valued in Paintshop. The tool is easy enough to use, once you pass the initial learning curve, and priced to make it accessible to the non-corporate user. Installation was easy and uneventful, startup on my dual-core system was slow as expected, but ran smoothly once up.

One feature that continues to improve over the years is the shape fitting selection (something that used to be the shape or outline wizard and is now being called Magic Move), still not perfect and does require a little help with touch-up, but leaps and bounds over what used to be required to cut and move a non-standard shape within a picture. I still love the layering (originally discovered it in Photoshop, and loved when introduced to PaintShop).

Overall, a solid set of improvements on the previous version, maybe enough to warrant springing for the upgrade if you still run version 7, any version earlier than that is a definite candidate for upgrade. P-)