Corels tenure of Paint Shop Pro has seen its transformation from a niche photo-editing application to something with much wider appeal. The only convoluted thing about Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 is the title; in every other respect its easy to get to grips with, providing a good introduction to photo editing for newcomers and enough sophistication to attract serious amateurs. Those who want to quickly get their photos sorted and move on are well catered for. There are plenty of one-step photo fixers, such as one-step photo fix, one-step noise removal and one-step purple fringe fix.
This version introduces Express Lab which allows you to quickly rate and apply basic edits such as cropping and red-eye removal to a folder of photos. Express Lab includes Smart Photo fix, an extended version of the one-step photo fix, which allows you to tweak tonal and colour settings after the software has made its best effort. Beginners who are keen to experiment with retouching and other editing tasks will find a range of tools that are easy to use and produce fairly good results, even in inexperienced hands. The makeover tools include a blemish fixer, a toothbrush and a suntan brush. Aside from personal makeovers, one of the most commonly undertaken retouching tasks is cloning to remove objects, but seamless cloning requires some skill and experience.
Paint Shop Pros Object Remover is easier to use than conventional cloning brushes; theres no painting involved, you just select the source and target areas. It works well with some subjects, but results can be a hit and miss. There are enough basic and intermediate tools and projects here to keep those new to Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, or photo editing in general, busy for a long time. Corel has got the balance between ease of use and worthwhile end results about right. Guidance, in the form of the Learning Centre, a context aware panel that provides step-by-step project guidance as well as advice on the currently selected tool, is helpful and apposite without being intrusive – you can turn it off when you no longer feel in need of it. When you get to that stage theres plenty more to explore in the form of advanced editing controls. Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 has tonal and colour controls that can match Photoshops in range and sophistication, but some of the advanced tonal editing tools, such as histogram adjustment and highlight/midtone/shadow arent always that intuitive.
All the adjustment tools and filters effects settings can be saved as presets, and a few existing ones are provided. But there arent enough of them and what there is isnt always very useful. Preset libraries that correct for common exposure and colour problems would be a big step forward. Paint Shop Pro was one of the first applications to deal with the problem of noise and its digital camera noise removal filter is superb. It also has an easy-to-use artificial depth of field effect, backlighting and fill flash effects for handling difficult lighting as well as purple fringe and chromatic aberration removal tools. Add to that a new HDR (high dynamic range) photo-merging feature and editable layer styles for creating drop shadows, glows, bevels and the like, and you have an extremely capable photo editor thats suited to a wide range of abilities.
