Review by Snap, Crackle and Pop

THE QUICK TAKE: There’s a real need for a product like this - something easy to use that will get all those photos off everyone’s cameras and hard drives, and get the photos organized, edited, and shared. Something to realize some of the promise of managing your photos electronically. But sadly in practice Corel PhotoShop isn’t that product - the emphasis and execution are off the mark.

THE FULL REVIEW: The description of Corel PhotoShop Express 2010 really caught my interest. A program that could help me do a quick retouch, as well as organize my backlog of photos, could really be useful. Digital photography makes it easy to take lots of photos, but more people are realizing the challenge of managing all those photos after the shot.

I’ve done a lot of photography and photography projects, and used Adobe Photoshop and Paintshop Pro quite a bit. I like them both for different reasons, but there are a few key needs I’d come to realize weren’t being met:n- Sometimes I needed to do a quick retouch with a handful of tools, and at times the plethora of features of those more complicated programs just got in the way.n- Those programs were also no help for organizing and tagging the backlog of photos.n- Getting the photos uploaded (to share or print) can be time consuming.

I think lots of people have some similar needs. So, a great idea, right?nnUnfortunately the reality is a little jarring, at least for me. I’m used to having some say about what is installed, and how, and how the program handles my files. I also like to know what’s going on - for example, when I click update, I’d like to know if there is an update, and how large, so I could decide when to update. I only found out it was updating when I quit the program.

INSTALLATION: I’m pretty tolerant of programs that need a lot of time and space to install, especially imaging programs - the input and output devices make it complicated. Getting it right is what counts. But 2+GB, really? That’s somewhere between 100 and 1000 times larger than some of my favorite imaging programs. (A lot of the time seemed to be spent on configuring Microsoft’s .NET framework - another product that seemed like a great idea but is cumbersome in practice. And, it installs the Windows Media Encoder … which might be great for some, but I have no plans to use it.) Luckily System Restore will unwind this mess.

INTERFACE: The user interface is very attractive, if cryptic and limited. There are very few choices, tools or options. (That may be a pro or a con, depending on your point of view.) The help files are somewhat limited, but may be adequate for those likely to use this program.

FILE SEARCH: When you first start up PaintShop Photo, it starts searching for files. Unfortunately, that’s not what I wanted it to do, and not only could I not find a way to stop it, it didn’t provide any update on how the search was proceeding, or where it was searching. It ought to ask whether to do that, or to let the user manually import.

EDITING FEATURES: The editing features are simply too limited. Given the computer resources this product consumers, they could easily have included a broader range of features. I’m not sure why they thought it was important to add a lot of video features, but give short shrift to the image editing - a good example of how they missed in emphasis.

BOTTOM LINE: This might be a reasonable product for someone who is primarily interested in organizing and then sharing or printing photos; for whom editing is a low priority; who doesn’t feel the need to know what the software is doing to your files; and who likes a program that will go ahead and make decisions without asking for input. That’s pretty much the opposite of me. But if that’s you, and you have a powerful computer - it may be a fit, and it has a very attractive and simplistic user interface.