Corel Paintshop Pro 2019
£69.99/$79.99
perennial favourite for windows USERS
Corel is aiming Paintshop Pro 2019 at beginners, hobbyists and enthusiasts, but the program’s vector-based drawing tools extend its appeal for business users creating presentations, diagrams and annotations – it also has paint tools for digital artists.
The interface is split into two windows: the Manage screen is used for browsing the folders on your computer and also for creating ‘virtual’ Collections of images without changing their location, while the Edit screen is for photo-editing work.
There’s plenty of help for beginners via a handy Learning Center palette and an Essentials workspace with a cut-down set of tools – though this perhaps oversimplifies what this program can actually do.
You can open and process Raw files and the new version adds support for over 100 new camera models. Other new features include 360º photo editing, and the ability to add effects and enhancements while cropping a photo.
Performance
The list of features is great, but Paintshop Pro 2019’s Raw editing tools offer only basic enhancement options and, while it does support automatic lens corrections, it failed to find a match for many of our lenses, and chromatic aberration and vignette corrections must be applied manually. The Ultimate edition includes Corel Aftershot 3 for image cataloguing and Raw conversions, but it’s much further behind with camera support and hardly seems worth the effort. Things are better in Paintshop Pro’s main Edit window, with good support for selections, layers and masks, and a wide range of effects.