Corel PaintShop Pro X7 £60 / $80 Windows
One of Photoshop’s oldest rivals
aintShop Pro has become simpler and more novice-friendly over the years. It now presents an integrated workflow with three tabs: Manage, Adjust and Edit.
The Manage tab takes care of your photo organisation. You can browse folders directly without having to import them, but you can also create virtual and smart collections. On the whole, it’s simple and straightforward to understand.
The Adjust panel is for routine image enhancements, and offers a good selection of effects. These adjustments are not non-destructive, though – PaintShop Pro might look like Lightroom and PhotoDirector, but
Pin fact it’s a traditional editor that edits your images directly, saving new versions of your files when it’s done.
The Edit panel offers more advanced and manual controls, such as the levels, curves and colour adjustments you’d use in Photoshop. PaintShop Pro is also compatible, Corel says, with Photoshop plug-ins, so you can add extra tools. The new X7 version brings a Magic Fill tool (the equivalent of Adobe’s Content-Aware Fill), 30% faster brushes, and text- and shape-cutting tools. This underlines that fact that PaintShop Pro is not just for imageediting – it’s an all-round painting, drawing and illustration tool.
Performance
The editing tools are comprehensive, but they’re also a little clunky. The adjustment dialog boxes offer small before and after previews, which seems terribly old-fashioned. There is a checkbox to display the results of your adjustments live, but the screen updates are not quick.
Worst of all, it falls down on one of the most basic operations for an image editor today: opening and converting raw files. It has a Camera Raw Lab, which opens automatically if you select a raw image for the Edit mode. Oddly, this can be bypassed if you simply use the Adjust mode, with rather poor results.
Not that the Camera Raw Lab’s results are much better. The tools are limited and the quality of the conversions is poor. You’ll have to work pretty hard to equal the quality of your camera’s JPEGs, let alone improve on them.