The one-time purchase options are a good fit for those who still resent Adobe's move to a subscription-only model for Photoshop, Lightroom, and Illustrator. For $9.99 per month, you get both Photoshop and Lightroom, but Illustrator starts at $19.99 per month, if you prepay for a year. Photoshop Elements ($99), Adobe's consumer-level photo editing software, requires no subscription, but that software has more of a hobbyist feel, as opposed to the company's pro-level offerings.
The Ultimate version adds a Highlight Reel video slideshow-creating feature (similar to the one in Corel VideoStudio), MultiCam Capture Lite for screen and webcam video presentations, Painter Essentials 8 for simple drawing, sketching, and painting on the PC.
corel paint shop pro 10
You can also save in Adobe PSD format (though you lose vector layers and other features), along with dozens of other standard image formats. If you open a PSD file created in Photoshop, layers are preserved, and you can edit them separately to taste. Afterwards, your edits are fully editable if you open the resulting PSD in Photoshop. What this means is that if you're working with someone who uses Photoshop, you'll be able to edit compatibly in PaintShop, but if you start in PaintShop, they'll only see a flattened version of your file.
Another gap is the lack of control over the effects. Sometimes you want to tone it down a bit, as I found with the Instant Film effect. Photoshop Elements' instant effects are indeed adjustable, but PaintShop's aren't.
The most commonly used photo editing tool by far is the crop tool. It may seem that there's nothing to it, but Adobe supercharged Photoshop's crop tool, even adding AI-powered auto-suggested cropping (now also found in Photoshop Elements). Corel continues to give attention to its own crop tool, too. It gives you a better idea of your final result by darkening the rest of the image. It offers overlays for composition guides, including golden spiral, golden ratio, and rule of thirds. When you rotate with the tool, the crop box stays put while the image rotates, so you can see the result without tilting your head.
AI Background Replacement. Replacing a photo's background used to be a many-step, hit-or-miss process in Photoshop. That program, and now PaintShop have both flipped the script on that scenario, making it a one-click affair. The AI Background Replacment tool in PaintShop works with human subjects, while Photoshop and Skylum Luminar now have tools for changing background skies in landscapes, too. The latter is still missing in PaintShop.
AI Background replacement is not unlike using Photoshop's Subject Select tool, which instantly isolates and masks a human (or even nonhuman) subject in your photo and lets you put whatever you want in the background layer. PaintShop does simplify the process, however, offering preset backgrounds.
AI Portrait Mode. I was expecting AI face manipulation tools like those in ON1 and Photoshop, but this tool is really just for selecting a subject and adding background blur. It works much like the iPhone's Portrait mode. The quality of the result depends on the accuracy of the selection. The selection wasn't perfect for my test shot, but luckily you can tweak it. Since the effect is simulating lens bokeh, it's interesting that you can choose between round and hexagonal apertures. I found that using the latter with less feathering worked best.
AI Upsampling. We've all had to deal with an image that was just too small or low-resolution for the purpose at hand. This tool does a remarkable job of removing that blocky effect when you enlarge such photos. The left side in the image above shows those blocky artifacts, while the right side uses Corel's AI Upsampling tool to produce a pleasing, smooth result. The tool offers denoising at the same time, but I was able to get this result without using any. Photoshop offers several sampling options for enlargement, but when I used them on the same image, none of them produced a result as good as this. They all still showed blockiness and artifact distortion.
AI Style Transfer. This is an effect that an earlier version of PaintShop called Pic-to-Painting. It's only available in the minimalist Photography workspace along with other effects in an Instant Effects panel. These effects resemble the Prisma-app craze of a few years ago, and have appeared in many photo apps, notably the competing CyberLink PhotoDirector. They use AI technology to generate art from your photos resembling that of specific painters, such a Picasso or Van Gogh.
Corel includes a good selection of painterly and artistic effects by default, while CyberLink requires extra downloading and charges extra for some of the effects. You can use a slider to adjust the strength of the effect, for a degree of customization. The Photography interface lets you use the split before-and-after view, seen above.
Once you move into Edit mode, the full assortment of tools comes into play. Just as in Photoshop, you can add layers, manipulate grouped objects, and adjust curves and levels. Layers are much better done than in ON1 Photo Raw, with a more Photoshop-like, clear view of each layer in an optional panel. You can create Vector, Raster, Art Media, Mask, and Adjustment layer types, with all the blending modes you'd expect.
Two selection tools, Smart Selection and Auto Selection, are similar to Photoshop's magic wand. The first did a decent job of letting me brush to create an edge-detected selection. But the Auto Selection is more impressive. You draw a box, and the tool selects an object inside it. In my testing, this only worked with very uniform backgrounds (a clear sky, for example) and objects with well-defined edges. Still, it's a useful tool for plucking a head off and using it against a different background. In the right circumstances, it works quite well.
Content-aware object removal and moving is a recent addition. This lets you improve composition by moving or removing an object within a photo, often a human, while maintaining the background. For removal, you have to select some background to replace the object with, so it's not as automatic as the equivalent tool in Adobe Photoshop Elements. The clone stamp tool shows a preview where you're about to apply it, and like all the tools and brushes, the size slider is based on your image size, which helps prevent you from getting a tiny brush when you need to make big changes, for example.
These are accessible from the Materials panel, and editable in the Materials Properties dialog. You get patterns and textures as well as gradients. And you can download more from Corel. It's at least as good as what you get with Adobe Photoshop Elements, but not quite as infinitely tweakable as Photoshop.
When you start Edit mode with a raw camera file loaded, PaintShop opens the Lab interface, which is a lot like Photoshop's equivalent Camera Raw window. Here you can not only change the white balance and recover highlights, but also apply lens-profile-based corrections for chromatic aberration and vignetting. I'm not impressed with PaintShop's version of lens profile correction. I still didn't see any correction of geometric distortion, and vignette correction overcompensated in some test photos. Chromatic aberration wasn't removed automatically, but the program has a good tool for this in the Complete Editing interface. Most lens profile correction depends on people creating the profiles, so it's not an exact science. DxO PhotoLab excels at this type of correction.
Text Tools. Entering text was delay-free in my testing. Text capabilities include superscript, subscript, and justification. The nifty Paste-to-Fit option lets your text match a shape in your image. It's not quite as cool as Photoshop Elements' ability to wrap text around a curved shape in your image, however. You can hollow out text and create raster cutouts, which is a powerful effect. But for really impressive font work, PaintShop can't compete with Photoshop, which lets you mess with the actual character shapes using glyphs and apply effects like 3D extrusion.
For online sharing, PaintShop can open your email client and attach your image. Corel has removed the direct social sharing features since the social networks keep changing their APIs. Like Photoshop, PaintShop lets you optimize images for display on webpages.
For photographers less interested in visual arts and crafts, our photo workflow Editors' Choice winner, Lightroom Classic, is a better choice. The $99.99 Adobe Photoshop Elements, our Editors' Choice pick for enthusiast photo software, offers many of Adobe's unmatched photo-manipulation tools and a great selection of guided edit effects. Because it still is the state of the art, Photoshop remains PCMag's image editing Editors' Choice winner, but Windows-using pros who need that program's more-common tools are likely to be satisfied with this budget option.
Hi. I would like to re-open this question ( ). I have a new computer with the Intel HD 620 driver integrated with the CPU. I have experienced exactly the same problems as indicated above with my trusty legal copy of Paintshop Pro X2 (Version 12). Although not officially supported in WIn10, I have been running it on a WIn10 machine with Nvidia drivers for the last two years very successfully.. I have been in touch with Corel, and they recommend updating, which I am not inclined to do because their recent editions are poorer and slower than the one I use. I would dearly love to know if this could be supported in a new driver update.
You may use this method to install most 3rd party plugins as long as the plugin is compatible with PaintShop Pro. For example, PaintShop Pro currently supports four of eight Photoshop plugin interfaces. They are:
The Professional Photo Editing Software Collection includes Painter Essentials 5, which helps convert photos into realistic digital paintings in a variety of styles (or you can start a digital painting from scratch within the program), Athentech Perfectly Clear 3 SE, a suite of powerful image correction and manipulation tools that streamline and improve workflow, and Corel AfterShot 3, for all your RAW photo editing needs! 2ff7e9595c
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