Review by Daysong Reflections

I have been a user of PhotoImpact for many years. I began using it with version 3.0 and the latest version is 13.0. Within the past few years Corel has bought out both PhotoImpact and Paint Shop Pro. Apparently the company has decided to drop PhotoImpact and continue to support and develop Paint Shop Pro. I decided to bite the bullet and learn to use Paint Shop Pro since it is only a matter of time until my PhotoImpact software will no longer work with Windows. Windows 7 does not like to play well with it already but I have been able to work around it thus far. I use PhotoImpact almost daily and it has several features that I have not found in other software. I was hoping that Corel just might have incorporated some of those features in PaintShop Pro X6 but so far I have not been able to discover them.

Actually some of the most basic features that I am accustomed to using in PhotoImpact do not seem to be available in PSP. A drop shadow in PhotoImpact required just a click or 2 and included multiple options as to shadow direction, size, transparency, etc. It appears that in PSP, one must duplicate the image, adjust the transparency, and position it manually. BUMMER. I loved being able to easily perform different tasks nearly automatically plus save sequences I used often as a task that required one click to activate. If PaintShop Pro has these capabilities, I will at least have a sharp learning curve ahead of me.

On the other hand, for photo enhancement, Paint ShopPro works beautifully. I was able to vastly improve the quality of several poorly lit photos with just a click or two. Clearly PaintShop Pro is geared more toward photo manipulation than the computer graphic utilities I need in my work. I can see that I will be spending a lot of time with PaintShop Pro tutorials if I am ever to learn to use this software with the ease I now use PhotoImpact.