Sarasota PC Monitor
Corel Paint Shop Pro XI
A Software Review
by Dave Winkelman
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.When it was available for free several years ago, it was called Paint Shop. When Jasc Software issued a paying version, it was renamed Paint Shop Pro and remained a Jasc product up through version 9 when it was purchased by Corel. They made some upgrades and issued version X as a Corel product. In September of this year, Corel upgraded it again and issued what will be reviewed here, version XI. Corel markets this product to photo hobbyists who want simple tools that easily enable them to produce professional quality images, and to professional photographers who require a product that lets them explore creative possibilities through the use of an array of powerful professional tools. At a current price of $89.99 for new users and $59.99 for an upgrade, its cost for a fully featured image editing product is at or below the competition.
A Summary of new features that were added in version XI includes:
Organizer - A photo management center that allows you to search images on your computer by filename, date, file type or folder location.
Color Changer Tool - Lets the user easily change images to achieve more realistic colors.
Time Machine - Special effects filtering that shows what photos would look like if they were taken from eras ranging from the 1800's to the 1990's.
Depth of Field Effect - Allows you to replicate the depth of field look found in high end SLR cameras by applying focus to a region of a photo while applying an out-of-focus blur to the rest of the image.
Skin Smoothing - Automatically remove wrinkles, scars, or signs of aging from faces in digital photos.
Film and Filter Effects - Lets you make photos look like they were taken with a specific type of film or filter. 50 different combinations are offered or you can create and save your own look.
Enhanced Crop Tool - Gives users the ability to choose a predefined crop size or to rotate the selected crop area.
Levels and Curves - Provides users with control over some of the most critical image adjustments such as contrast, color depth and levels. Less experienced users can use three automatic settings to optimize the contrast and color levels in images. Lynda.com Training Videos - Two hours of video tutorials on how to use new tools and other features of the software. Note that these were not included in the review package.
Email Features - Send photos as attachments or an embedded photo directly in the body of an email. The software automatically resizes photos for email so you don't have to open and resave.
Corel Painter and Corel Painter Essentials Compatibility - Allows you to open and save images as RIFF files to create a seamless workflow with painting and illustration software.
Video Preview - Review, open and organize videos and extract single frames from video clips.
Corel Snapfire Plus SE - This separate, but integrated program offers a series of image editing, photo management tools, and photo project templates to create a variety of calendars, collages, certificates, CD Labels, magazine covers, books and Photo Stamps. After a 30-day preview of Plus's features, you have the option to purchase it or it reverts to the basic version of Snapfire. I was not too impressed with the Plus program, because many of the additional features were already contained in Paint Shop Pro XI. The only thing I used in the basic Snapfire program was the slide show feature.
The built-in electronic documentation was very helpful in learning the features of Paint Shop Pro, and was also included in version X. The Learning Center which is part of the Help Menu was designed to enable anyone, regardless of their previous software experience, to build user confidence by helping them to use the editing features in a short period of time. Also included on the CD was a 128 page PDF version of the Paint Shop Pro XI user guide.
Being a Photo Hobbyist, I did not need to use all of the hundreds of editing features available in this product. My needs were confined to editing, correcting, and improving the digital images that I had taken with my new 7.1 Mega Pixel Canon SD 550D camera and scanning and resurrecting hundreds of black and white family photographs that date back to the early 1900's and are part of a genealogy project I have been working on.
I purchased the Canon SD 550D Digital Camerasubcompact camera in April of 2006, with the intention of taking pictures on a trip to Alaska, which I was unable to take. In place of this trip, I have taken photos all around Sarasota, in our development, and photos of our 75 lb standard black poodle and our tuxedo long hair cat. How I set up my system to edit photos and some of the features of Paint Shop Pro XI that I used on these photos are as follows:
Create a Folder - In Windows Explorer I name a folder on my hard drive to which I will download the pictures from my digital camera.
USB Digital Card Reader - I insert the memory card from my camera into a digital card reader and using Windows Explorer, I download the digital photos from my camera to the named hard drive folder. Note that Corel includes a program named Photo Downloader which will automatically open and download photo files when a card reader or digital camera is plugged into the computer. I decided not to use this program, because it did not seem to be as easy to use as the method that I chosen.
Open Paint Shop Pro - After the program is loaded click on the file open icon and point it to the folder where the photos are stored. If you click on Browse the folder will open and the photos can be displayed as thumbnails in the right hand pane of the program. You can change the size of these thumbnails in Program Preferences in the File menu or a Zoom slider just below the icons on the menu bar. Note that the larger you open the thumbnails the easier it is to determine what needs to be edited in the image, but you will see fewer thumbnail files on the screen and must scroll down to see more images.
Organizer - At the bottom left of the screen is an icon named "Organizer". If you place your cursor (mouse arrow) on this icon the thumbnails in the browser will appear and if you click on this icon the thumbnail images will stay open. You can view some of them on the open right pane of the program (the left one third of the screen presents a pane of the image folders on your hard drive) and scroll down to see the remainder. If you open the thumbnail images to full size, it is easy to tell what editing needs to be done for each image.
Rotate Images - Very often you will take a vertical image by holding the camera at right angles to the normal camera horizontal position. When you do this to get more image height, the image in the browser will appear rotated counter clockwise at 90 degrees to the normal viewing plane. To upright the image you must rotate it 90 degrees to the right and this is very easy in PSP by selecting Image from the menu and then Rotate Right, Rotate Left, or Free Rotate from the dropdown menu. Selecting Rotate Right or Left will give you the choice, with one click, of rotating the image right or left by 90 degrees. In free rotate you can select 3 fixed rotations right or left of 90, 180, or 270 degrees or rotate the image right or left by the number of degrees that you specify. This free rotate option is particularly helpful, because it is difficult to make sure that the digital camera is always perfectly horizontal or vertical when you are taking pictures. It is very common to unknowingly take the picture just a few degrees off of horizontal or vertical and this can be corrected using the free rotate feature.
* Straightening and Perspective Correction Tools - Another way to correct tilted images is to use these tools depending upon the position defect in the image. From the Tools Menu, you can straighten images when they have a strong vertical or horizontal feature, such as a building or horizon. To do this click the Straighten Tool on the Toolbar and a horizontal bar with end handles appears on the image. Drag each handle of the bar to align it with the part of the image that you want to straighten; the roof line of a building, for example. Then click the Apply Icon (green check mark) on the menu bar at the top. If you take a picture of tall or wide objects the resulting image may have perspective distortion - that is, objects may seem to be leaning or angled. This occurs when the camera is at an angle to the subject. To perform this correction, select the Perspective Correction tool on the Tools toolbar. A bounding box with corner handles appears on the image. Drag each handle to the corner of the object that should be rectangular and again click the Apply icon on the menu bar at the top.
* One Step Photo Fix - Looking at the thumbnail images your can easily see images that are too dark, too light, or just do not look very clear and will need some type of adjustment for color balance, contrast, clarity, or image saturation. This feature which is part of the Photo Toolbar and is selected as a menu item from Enhance Photo at the top of the screen, corrects all of these problems automatically with one click of One Step Photo Fix menu item.
* Smart Photo Fix - I do not use this feature much because it is less automatic than One Step Photo Fix. It does the same photo analysis but suggests settings to corrections for color, brightness, sharpness, and saturation. Then it lets you manually fine tune the settings to these suggestions or to values that you select.
* Crop Tool - Very often there are parts of a digital image that you do not want because they detract from the main part of the image that you want to concentrate on. For example, you take a photo of a family member, but it includes a multicolor background that detracts from the photo of the family member. It is desirable to remove the family member from most of the background and this is easily done by using the cropping tool. On the Tool Bar this tool is named the Selection Tool and is an icon shaped as a dotted rectangle. When you select this tool it presents crosshairs which you click on with the left mouse button and drag it to produce a rectangular border which defines the area that you want to crop. When this rectangular area is defined, select Image from the main menu and select Crop to Selection. Your selected area will appear and then use Save As from the file menu to save the cropped selected area.
* Printing an Image - To print an image I use Print Layout from the File Menu. When you select this you can see what the printed image will look like on the printed page. When Print Layout opens up you drag and drop the image in the upper left hand pane to the blank page in the larger right pane. Your photo shows up on this blank page and Print Layout lets you change the view to Portrait or Landscape and to place the image on the page. You also can change your printer settings depending upon the type of print medium you will be using. You can save this print within Print Layout as an attached Template to your file or to not save it.
With the genealogy project I have scanned hundreds of very old black and white pictures taken between 1900 and 1930. Most of them were quite faded and on the smallish side at 2"X3". With each of these I use the One Step Photo Fix tool and, when necessary, the Scratch Removal tool. All of these were restored to their like new appearance and have been saved and backed-up to an external ZIP drive.
Print Shop Pro XI has many other features found in the most expensive photo editing software. Some of these are but not limited to: preparing slide shows, access to image information, red eye tool, clone tool, high pass filters, lens correction filters, 16-bit editing, lighting correction features such as fill flash and backlighting, color management support of CMYK input and output for commercial printers, adjustment layers, makeover tools, scripting, scratch remover tool, object remover, warp brush tool, black and white and infrared effects, motion blur, text tool, picture tubes (paint on photos with artistic elements), and picture frames.
Minimum System Requirements
500 MHz processor
Windows XP (SP2), Windows 2000 (SP4)
256 MB RAM
500 MB of free hard-disk space
1024X768 resolution display, 16-bit color
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 :
Copyright 2007. This article is from the January 2007 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/
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