Review by Tom Steele

I’ve been using Paint Shop Pro since version 7. When Corel first bought it from it’s shareware creators, they began to dumb it down and it really lost a great deal of its following. Fortunately, they left most of the power under the hood and those features that had been dumbed out of the menus, were still accessible for power users.

I’ve since upgraded to PSPX and PSP 14, so I am very familiar with the program. Lets start with the inevitable comparison to photoshop. Paint Shop Pro can do, and has been able to do, 95%+ of what Photoshop as been able to do all along… Layers, yep had them forever, curves, yep… Color enhancement, easy one fixes and removing objects, they are all there. White balance correction, yep - in several places actually. It can read raw files from most major camera makers and will save to any format you can imagine. It can remove objects, repair old photos, make new photos look old, add frames, upload to Flickr, facebook, photobucket, etc… It really does it al.

Paint Shop Pro is powerful enough for anyone, even the snide, presumptuous photo editors that would have you believe that if your photo editing package didn’t cost $500 then it isn’t worth looking at… Pure elitist hogwash.

ANYTHING that you want to do with a photo can be done with this program.

So why isn’t it more widely accepted?nnWell, the industry likes a standard and photoshop was the standard back when PSP was still a $79 shareware program. So Photoshop became the standard. And once you learn the way a program works, you don’t want to have to relearn the way another program works. Often it is as simple as which key combinations you have to press. Once you have mastered one program, you don’t want to have to go back and relearn how to accomplish the same thing in another program.

There is one other big difference. Photoshop has always been far ahead of Paint Shop Pro in standardizing what colors you see on a photo no matter what monitor or computer you are using to view the photo. PSP only recently started trying to make this a priority.

For someone sending their work to LIFE magazine, this is important. For someone sending photos to Walgreens.com or making a shutterfly book for family and friends, it is not. All of the photo printers have software that corrects that sort of thing.

In the end it is fairly simple. If you need photoshop, get it. You will KNOW if you NEED it. If you aren’t sure, then you don’t need Photoshop. If you think you need PhotoShop, you probably DON’T need it. If $500 is chump change to you, then go ahead and get photoshop. If you make a living sending photos to major publications, get photoshop.

On the other hand, if $500 is a lot of money to you, get Paint Shop Pro. It is a super powerful photo editing program that has the power of photoshop under the hood, but with the ease of use that you would expect from a much less powerful program. You truly get the best of both worlds with Paint Shop Pro!nnLow price, ease of use and many automated picture fixing options, yet you also have the power of layers, curves and white balancing no so much more if you are willing to learn how to use them. This is truly a bargain priced program that does virtually everything PS does (and some things it does better) at a fraction of the cost.