Corel Paint Shop Pro 9.0
As shown: $129.00
See manufacturer site for availability
CNET Editors' Review
CNET Editors' Rating
- Reviewed by: Susan Glinert Stevens
- Reviewed on:
The good: Great value; excellent digital image tools; decent Web graphics and vector-drawing tools; terrific documentation.
The bad: Scripts are difficult to edit; no CMYK support; no panorama-stitching function.
The bottom line: A very capable image-editing program at a reasonable price.
Version 9.0 of Corel Paint Shop Pro adds some convenient tricks to help maximize the main work space, such as roll-away palettes and the ability to minimize open images to tabs. The most important interface addition is the new History palette, which tracks the actions you perform on the active image. The palette lets you undo and redo commands, making it easy to experiment. Unlike in Photoshop, you can undo a single command without affecting any subsequent entries in the list. What's more, the entire history can be exported to a script and subsequently applied to other images.
Also new is the Mixer palette, which emulates the color-mixing mechanics of a real brush and palette. Add dabs of color to the palette surface, swirl them around, and select the exact color you want. The palette was designed to work with Corel's new natural media tools, simulating the tactile experience of analog art without the messy cleanup.
Corel Paint Shop Pro's photo-correction features are among its greatest strengths, containing noteworthy touches you won't find elsewhere. For example, the Automatic Color Balance filter has a slider to adjust for lighting temperature: incandescent, fluorescent, daylight, or anything in between. You can process your photos manually or take advantage of the automatic commands in the Enhance Photo menu. Photographers who use raw formats (unprocessed data from your camera's CCD) will be happy to learn that Paint Shop Pro 9.0 can preprocess and open these images.
Paint Shop Pro has several filters for correcting various lens distortions--barrel, fish-eye, and pincushion--plus a chromatic aberration filter for removing the colored fringing often seen on sharply contrasting edges. The excellent noise-removal tool gave us better results than any comparable tool we've seen in an image-editing program to date. Also, Paint Shop's Clarify filter improved murky underwater pictures. In addition, each filter shows a large preview window so that you can fiddle with pertinent adjustment settings.
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User Reviews
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"Creative giant" By lilnana
Pros: Open ended creative potential
Cons: PSP isn't something you can jump into and become Van Gogh
Summary: For anyone with imagination, PSP is only limited to your ambition. Personal photos, scanned graphics, personal art can all be utilized as a jumping off point to soar.
It isn't intuitive or logical, but once learned , there's no limit to it's capabilities.
"Old reliable" By wsheltry
Pros: Newest version adds scripts from a drop-down list; there is a 'one-click' touch up that adjusts HSL components
Cons: Hard to step away from
Summary: I've used PSP since the shareware days. Version 6 was my first real photo retouching experience. I've been using version 7 since its introduction. I could have stayed with it longer, but 9 has some compelling additions that made it too hard to refuse the upgrade. It also ... Expand full review
Specifications
See full specsQuick Specs
- License qty: 1 user
- Version: 9
- License type: Complete package