Review by SP3204

I primarily use Photoshop Elements to manage my photo collection and often use it to process photos. What I wanted from Paintshop Pro is a more Photoshop editing application to easily overlay text, do layer editing,and otherwise be more creative. I have an earlier version of this application. There’s nothing easy about this, plan to spend some time with it. Tools like Picasa provide some basic editing and magic adjustments, but really tweaking photos takes up your time when you want to get good results. However, the undo function is ynnThere are lots of gidgets and widgets in this version and I have a lot of fun experimenting with them. As with most of these applications, they take some learning and reading and hitting the help menu to learn how to operate the various functions. Obviously, this was free to me, but I bought my previous version and would buy this one too - it’s not Photoshop, but it provides a lot of the functionality for a fraction of the cost. I don’t do a lot of portrait editing, but the FaceFilter tool would be a useful addition to a photographer’s toolset.

This doesn’t manage your collection of photos so you should have something like Elements or the free Picasa, and then you can edit freely from there (don’t save over your originals though!). It’s also not going to provide the process flow as from Elements (to some degree) or Lightroom. I think Corel has a successful application for this niche - layer editing and creative image manipulation. If you’re after serious photo editing, look to Lightroom (or Elements or Photoshop).

All in all, I’m enjoying this upgrade and it works well for me.