Review by Tracy Rowan

It’s really kind of hard for me to evaluate PSP X8 fairly because I find I’m always comparing it to Painter 2016. I use the latter a lot, the former… it simply doesn’t do as much as either Painter, or Photoshop Effects. And that’s fine, considering the vast difference in price points between it and the others. It’s at the low end of the image manipulation range, and for that reason alone it deserves kudos, so let’s talk about it from that point of view.

This is a program the average user is going to love having. It does a heck of a lot of cool stuff to your photos. There’s a quick adjust tab which includes a lot of very basic fixes like noise removal, vibrancy, brightness and contrast and the like. The edit tab takes things a few steps further with resizing, photo effects, cropping, and even layers. It’s a fairly sophisticated package for the home user, and if the effects aren’t as finely tuned, as in a more expensive program, or the controls aren’t as easy to master, it’s really a small thing for the value you’re gettingnnI can tell you that it works just fine in Windows 10 on my laptop, though it’s a bit slow. Again, not a huge problem compared to the value you’re getting. My best advice to you is to figure out what it is you’d want to use an image program for and buy accordingly. If you’re simply not sure, then start with PSP and see if you strain its abilities. If so, you can always move up.