Corel PaintShop Pro X5

Corel's image editor, PaintShop Pro, has since 1990 been a low-cost alternative to Adobe Photoshop (which first appeared in 1988) and the later Photoshop Elements (2001).Though it offers a lot of image manipulation, during its whole existence PaintShop Pro has lagged behind Adobe's products in both capabilities and slickness of interface. This latest PaintShop Pro X5 version adds some major features we've already seen elsewhere?face tagging, mapping, and Instagram-like one-click photo effects. That's not to say Corel hasn't innovated, with its own twists on these features. At $59.99, is still a bargain compared with its Adobe competitors, but it also still trails in deep features and usability.

Installing
PaintShop Pro is available in regular edition for $59.99 and an Ultimate edition that adds Reallusion FaceFilter Studio 2.0 portrait enhancement tools, Nik Color Efex Pro 3.0 filters, and a collection of royalty-free images, brushes and textures. You can download and install a full-function 30-day trial version of PaintShop Pro X5 from Corel's site. It's a 138MB download, and the installer unfortunately tries to side-load a browser toolbar, which you can deselect if you're alert during installation.

Interface
The interface is little changed from X4's, but with competitors like Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 cleaning up their interfaces considerably, PaintShop's remains overly cluttered with buttons, icons, rulers, panels, and menus. It's a standard three-panel affair, with folder navigation on the left, the main image view in the center, and an info and action panel on the right. Along the bottom is your filmstrip view of photos in the current folder, aka the "tray." I do like how you can undock or hide any panels to taste. You can choose interface colors other than the default (and best, to my eyes) dark gray. An odd choice here is a distracting baby blue.

In contrast to the busy working area, three simple mode selectors grace the top of PaintShop's window?Manage, Adjust, and Edit. Most photo workflow apps add one or more output modes?Print, Web, and so on. Lightroom is the king of this, with the ability to customize which modes appear to taste. The Adjust Mode doesn't actually offer all of the adjustments the program is capable, of instead just offering some quick fix options, similar to Photoshop Elements' new design. One thing I'd like to see in PaintShop is a simple Revert button, for when you've gone beyond the pale with editing and need to start over. An optional History panel shows all your previous actions, and can even run scripts.

Importing and Organizing
Importing is a weak point for PaintShop Pro. It adds a "Review Photos" entry to the AutoPlay dialog that pops up whenever you plug camera media into your PC. But I had to navigate down to the folder where the captures resided, while Photoshop Elements found them for me. PaintShop does have an Import menu choice, but while it found my iPhone, it didn't find the photos on an SD media card. Of course, you could just use Windows' pretty good photo importer, which even lets you tag pictures on the way in, but Adobe Photoshop Element's import capabilities beat PaintShop's.

The app's documentation claims that you don't really need to specifically "import" images?PaintShop will enter any photos you open in its database, keeping track of changes and optionally keeping a copy of the original. But this isn't helpful when you're viewing photos on a memory card. It also means you have no way to preview raw camera photos before import or select only some for import as you can in the competition. Though I could do this with my iPhone photos, once I hit the import dialog's Get Pictures, I got an error message saying the file couldn't be written.

Once you've got images in, the Quick Review, summoned by double-clicking a tray thumbnail, shows your photos in full screen, with controls at the bottom for rating, discarding, zooming, and moving to the next or previous image. Doing this last with large raw camera files was still slow when they were on the SD card, faster when moved to disk, and simplifies quickly deciding on photos' merits.

PaintShop Pro gives you the usual ways to organize images?star ratings from 1 to 5 and tags that can be easily set from a sidebar Info panel, though not from a control that appears when you hover the mouse cursor over the image, as you can in Photoshop Elements. An Auto Group option lets you keep photos shot within a specified time frame together. And you can have the program create Smart Collections, specifying parameters like date range, name, caption, size, or tags. You can easily zoom in on the thumbnails or even beyond 100 percent size in Manage mode, which Elements' Organizer for some reason doesn't allow.

Faces. Now added to the usual organizing tools are face and place organizers. To get started with face recognition, you select some photos in a collection and hit the head icon and choose Find People. This doesn't work if you've selected photos from a computer folder?only from a collection. I scanned all my 1320 image files for faces, which took about 7 minutes. Once it was done, I could either attach a name on a photo's full preview, or switch to thumbnail view to see groups of found faces.

As with all face detection, non-faces (shrubs and such) were misidentified, but it seemed like more than most apps. Also, the same person's face would often appear in multiple groups, and there were a lot of ungrouped photos that contained the same faces that had a group. For the former, I could hit an X to easily ignore the non-faces.

The program doesn't have as clear or effective a system for "learning" a face as other apps do, though when click in the name box, occasionally a previous name appears. But if it doesn't, even when you start typing, suggestions from previous names you entered don't show up. Another problem is that the grid view doesn't zoom into the face, so if there's more than one face in the photo, you don't know which you're naming.

Once you've face tagged, you can select a person's name from the Collections panel to show just photos containing the named person's visage. But after that, there are no fun options like collages or face movies.

Maps and Location. PaintShop Pro's new mapping capability does include a nifty sharing project, called Share My Trip, but first let's take a look at the basic location feature. It can use embedded GPS data in the photos, or you can manually place them on a map integrated into the program or import a KML file.

The easiest, automatic way is if you have GPS data embedded in the photo files?usually the case for smart phone pictures. With those, you don't have to do anything; the program creates Collections based on location, which you can filter on. You can also import location from your Facebook check-ins. In Manage mode, one of the main view options along with Preview and Thumbnails is Map Mode. This shows a map with pins for each photo's location. A search box even lets you find specific locales.

Now for the Share My Trip feature. The sharing comes courtesy of Facebook and Dropbox?yes you need an account in both for the online sharing though you can create your geographical pictorial locally, too. You select applicable photos in the tray, and then run through a wizard, logging into both services for web sharing. The result was attractive, with a filmstrip across the bottom and a map with large thumbnails at each location. You can also simply view a small slideshow of the geo-tagged photos. Not as high-production-values as iPhoto's Places slideshows, but nice enough.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/CS44Advl8UM/0,2817,2358638,00.asp

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