Paint Shop Pro 9 Review

Paint Shop Pro 9 serves up a grand buffet of tools for working with digital photos and creating art.

This seemingly cluttered interface can appear a bit overwhelming to the novice but after opening images and just trying out the tools one at a time it won't be long before the particular 'map' will become more and more familiar with each editing. Like any program, the first time opening it may make you feel like you will never learn, but as many of us who remember our first PaintShop experience, practice really does wonders! In fact I think sheer visual experience is always more valuable than reading the manual. (although I would keep it handy.)

Photo fixers:

At the top menu there is a one stop button for fixing all your photo woes. It is called 'Enhance photo' with a drop down menu of choices, the first being a 'One step enhance' button that actually works quite well on most photos. I tried about ten and found I was quite pleased with the effect more times than not. However, I missed the 'fade' tool that I did not find under the edit tab to gently ease back the effect if it was over done, however the 'undo' tab is there. This is a great option for new photographers who have not ventured into all the enhancement tools individually and find them a bit daunting.

'Automatic color balance' will open up another menu where you can manually adjust the color temperature. I found this worked quite well with some portraits I shot outside in warming up the skin tones.

'Automatic contrast' also opens up dialog where you can adjust the effect to mild, normal or bold editing of contrast.

There is also Clarify, smoothing (which works a lot like Neat Image) and sharpening each with a manual editing dialog to adjust the effects to your personal appeal. All of these effects have a before and after window which I find very useful, as otherwise you are just guessing, so this saves a lot of time.

The only Photoshop tool similar to One Step Photo Fix would be Auto Level Adjustments. These are some good quick fixes for the novice, but it is well worth your time to learn how to properly adjust all these settings by using the separate tools as you will get much more pleasing results. In the meantime, the Photo fix should serve you well.

Under the 'Adjust' tab at the top of the menu panel you will find the more involved photo editing tools.

Color correction

This program provides many ways to adjust the balance of your photo colors. The correction seems to be quite on the money even though the Level adjustments are fewer in Paint Shop Pro than Photoshop, but this shouldn't present a problem. With the before and after feature it is actually quite easy to perfect the colors to your personal pleasing preference.

Fill Flash

This is to correct your underexposed areas. It basically lightens up darker areas of a picture to bring out more detail, much like how Shadow/Highlights works in Photoshop. This feature works well enough, but you can pretty much make this adjustment with levels (levels and curves), Other corrections such as hue, saturation and brightness all work as expected The same goes for distort/transform adjustments. It is easy enough to rotate, skew, and distort images as needed.

If you are used to working with Photoshop it may take a while to figure out where all the tools are, it is sort of like cooking in someone else's kitchen. For instance the 'curves' tool is not under 'Image> adjust' and it has a totally different adjustment screen which can feel awkward until you become acquainted.

Raw Importing

For those who work in RAW you will happy to know that there is built in support for opening raw files used by digital cameras, but Paint Shop Pro's utility lacks many of the options available in the higher priced editors. One of the most noticeable is the ability to set custom white balance temperatures. In Paint Shop Pro you are limited to seven preset white balance options. There are also five presets for the amount of sharpening.

The Raw converter was quite slow on my computer, but this may not be a problem unless you have a large quantity to convert.

Painting

Paint Shop Pro 9 adds a suite of new computer artist tools called Art Media Tools.

This program has a rather good painting side to it, although if you are serious about digital creative art I would highly recommend Corel IX for painting. However PSP9 provides more painting features than Photoshop. Some features are very useful, such as the ability to use different textures for your canvas and a different assortment media types. For instance, you could paint with water color or oil and the colors would smear, bleed and blend much like you would expect real water colors on paper or oil on canvas.

The brushes are actually quite impressive and offer many options for your particular style, though not as thorough as Painter I think most users will find the brushes and media highly adequate for their creative needs.

The mixer painter acts very much like a real artist palette where you can mix various colors to perfect the color you are looking for and then use whatever media you choose to produce realistic brush strokes for your painting.

I must say that I really missed the 'alt' command for the color picker. The picker is just above the brush tool however.

(I would highly recommend a graphics tablet to attain the best results in any painting program as a mouse just doesn't paint as efficiently as a stylus pen.)

I would say the painting tools offered are really quite 'creative'. The blending is not as refined as Painter, but this may be something that they will improve in their next version.

Selection tools include a simple shape tool, a lasso tool and a magic wand.  The magic wand will select a section of an image with the same range of colors.  This is useful when you have a simple background that you want to cut out.

History Palette

Paint Shop Pro 9 has added a new History palette to the program. This essentially lists all the actions done on an open image. Now, you can choose any step in the list and undo all changes made since that step. What I found interesting is that you can choose to undo individual steps without affecting subsequent actions. For example, if you made ten brush strokes, you can pick an earlier brush stroke and just undo that stroke alone.

Fun stuff

There are a lot of quick and easy frames to try out on your images that I found to be quick, simple and fun to use.

Under 'Effects' you will find a huge variety of fun effects to play with that are too numerous to list, such as the popular 'page curl', distortions, edge effects and a wide assortment of textures.

The Picture tube on the left menu bar is sort of strange name, but it does contain some great pictures which you can sort of 'shoot' onto your images. It is a little like cheating, as these are pre-created, but can add wonderful elements to a perhaps otherwise boring picture. There are butterflies for your scenes and beach balls for the beach, there are tigers to roam through your forest and fire for your 'hot' pix. There are bubbles, grass blades, vines and lightening so I promise you won't get bored and there are others that you can download on the internet.

I do think that the learning curve is quite steep for the newcomer, but Paint Shop Pro 9 has a vast library of support options.  Built into the product are tutorials, a Quick Guides Learning Center and Help Topics.  Online there is a searchable knowledge base an online technical support contact form and a user community center. 

I would say that upon comparing cost vs. features that Paint Shop Pro gives you more bang for your buck than most other programs.