The Edit workspace is where you’ll find the more complex editing tools. Smart Photo Fix is a good place to start if you’re not sure exactly what might be wrong with the photo. This section also has a handy Smart Photo Fix, which can analyze your photo and suggest adjustments to the brightness, shadows, highlights, and saturation settings. The Adjust workspace has the usual correction tools for optimizing color balance, adjusting the brightness and contrast, managing tone mapping, sharpening the image, and removing digital noise. The names of the two remaining workspaces can be confusing because both offer a selection of editing tools. As with Lightroom, you can switch back and forth between a Preview Mode, where a single photo is prominent, and a Thumbnail Mode, where many small thumbnails are featured on the screen.Īfter sorting through your p hotos and selecting one, you’re ready to move on to editing. Unfortunately, you can’t rearrange the placement of the palettes. By default, this workspace previews the selected photo at only a moderate size, although you can hide or alter the size of any of the palettes. The palette also shows basic information about the selected photo (drawn from the photo’s EXIF data). An info palette lets you add the tags and ratings to the photos. Using the navigation palette, you can select an entire photo folder on your computer, narrow the selection according to one or more tags that you’ve given to your photos, or narrow the selection according to the ratings that you’ve given to your photos. The Manage workspace lets you review and organize your photo files. I used that key combination often when running X4 on my notebook, because I frequently wanted to get a closer look at the image I was editing. Within any of the workspace sections, you can press Shift+F9 to add or remove the Organizer. The Organizer appears by default in the Manage and Adjust workspaces, but not in the Edit workspace, where you would want the selected image to display as large as possible. Located at the lower portion of the screen, it acts as a thumbnail display for the currently selected folder. X4 retains the Organizer palette from the previous Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3 version. Like the Library, Develop, Slideshow, Print, and Web workspaces in Lightroom, the three sections in PaintShop Pro X4 are meant to follow the natural progression of your workflow. The redesigned interface is divided into three distinct workspaces: Manage, Adjust, and Edit. These include Fill Light and Clarity (for bringing out the darker portions of a photo), HDR Tools (for combining multiple photos to achieve a higher dynamic range), Photo Blend (for swapping out sections of similar photos), Selective Focus (for creating narrowly focused photos), and Vignette (for darkening the edges of a photo). Corel has also added some highly useful editing features. This latest version has a restructured user interface (UI) that more closely resembles the workflow structure in Lightroom. It provides just about everything you need for high quality photo editing through an impressive collection of creative tools and filters.
PaintShop Pro X4 doesn’t include as many professional-level features as Adobe Photoshop CS5 or Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3, but given the much lower purchase price, you wouldn’t expect that. Yet, what’s compelling about X4 is how much it does offer.
#COREL PAINTSHOP PRO REVIEW SOFTWARE#
Can a software program sell for less than $80 and still be all things to all people? That’s the challenge for Corel PaintShop Pro X4, as it tries to straddle the fence between offering much of the power of the high-end photo editing applications, while still being easy enough for novices to use without any training.