Review by Brian Connors

I’m just going to go right ahead and say it… I don’t really understand how the interface is supposed to work. Apparently you can only switch between workspaces if you’ve saved your document first, or whatever you’ve got loaded goes away? Or is it the workspace itself you’re supposed to save? Needless to say, this is a bit of a problem for this review.

That said, this is still a pretty good program once you figure out exactly what’s going on. The interface is similar to Photoshop Elements, with Manage, Adjust, and Edit workspaces that you can (somehow) switch between. As it happens, I generally prefer to use GIMP, and PaintShop compares pretty favorably to that too. There’s plenty of tools; anything you need to do can probably be done here; in Adjust mode, you get a pile of filters and tweaks (iPhoto-style), while in Edit mode you get a full photo-paint interface, with a huge selection of filters and Photoshop-style layers. Basically, it’s pretty much everything you might be looking for. As for the ancillary programs, I haven’t really looked at them.

This is a pretty versatile program, and quite a bargain to boot. However, getting up and running in it is likely to take a while, stumbling through menus and preference panes to figure out exactly what’s going on before you get your workflow going. This isn’t a huge liability, but it’s definitely a pain if you’re, say, a reviewer with a limited period of time to learn your way through. I’ll stick with GIMP, but if you’re patient enough to figure it out you can’t really go wrong with this.