I keep extolling the virtues of Corel Paintshop Pro X4. Corel products have come a long way over the past 10 years and now I would rate X4 as one of the best photo editing options around.
Heres what I like:
- In capabilities it sit somewhere between PS Elements and full blown PS.
- It has capabilites like selections, layers, blending modes, histogram, masks and other Photoshop tools that software like Lightroom often lacks. You do not have to use more complex tools like layers but they give you options for editing that are not found in Lightroom.
- It is relatively cheap - usually found around the $100 price point - cheaper even than Elements.
- It is compatible with most (but not all) PS plug ins including earlier versions of the Nik ones - some of the most recently released versions like color efex 4 are said to have problems but this is being looked into by Corel.
- It has power tools designed for photographers that until recently Elements has not had and in some cases still does not. Curves, black and white conversion including color filters, local contrast filters, powerful de noising filters and sharpening filters. It also has makeover tools (like tools to slimify persons and to smooth skin tones.)
- Two of my favourite and most used tools are tools to straighten images (works by the user aligining a line which appears on screen with either a vertical or horizontal in the image) and perspective correction. The latter is used to correct the buildings leaning over backwards effect caused by tilting a camera or photographing a building at an angle. In this case it works by the user taking a rectangle which appears on screen and individually aliging each of the 4 sides of the rectangle with the relevant lines in the image. The software then moves those into correct alignment and crops the image as necessary
- Some other photo tools I often use are tools to correct lens distortions - barrel, fisheye and pincushion. All work weel and are a life saver when using some lenses that distort verticals near the edge of images. Plus it has purple fringe and chromatic abberation tools.
- It has in built frame tools that allow frames and borders to be added easily. You can add your own frames to it if you know how and apply them to images at a click.
- It opens images stored in PS proprietary formats.
- The latest verison has full RAW support, editing and conversion.
- I like the way it saves files. In addition to save and save options, you can save a copy to another location (e.g. to a favorites folder) at a click of a button. Most of all it does not do something that PS does that I loath - try to force you to save every image as a psd (or Corels equivalent file) and then if you chose not to and save it as a jpg ask you AGAIN to save it as a psd file when you close the file. I hated this in PS, it was an absolute annoyance and bugged the living hell out of me.
The things I like less are ...................................
- Some of its terminology is a bit different to PS so when you study tutorials on the internet you have to make allowances for this.
- Corel seems not to produce patches for new RAW formats as often as they should but its support for cameras that were around at the date the software was first issued seems pretty comprehensive.
- It's a system hog and is slow to load.
- As noted above a few plugins do not work although I have found that most do and can just be transported across from PS if thats where you currently use them.where you currently use them.
