See the latest in this saga with review of PaintShop Pro Version 3
Corel Paint Shop Pro has been one of my favorite Paint editor tools for the past 10 years. Jasc, the original developers, understood that users wanted a lighttable-like interface to their images-> a browsing windows of thumbnail images from which users could decide which to edit and how. The Browse function in PaintShop pro was fast and allowed a lot of immediate shortcut operations (rotation, rename, delete, etc) that made managing your images a breeze. But also Jasc steadily improved the editing features in Paint Shop Pro so they matched and sometimes exceeded those in even Photoshop. They never matched the highend color, printing and layer sophistication of Adobe Photoshop. But Paint Shop Pro to this day has a better interface for previewing and saving edit sets for color correction, filter, and image effects than Photoshop. And at about $100 versus the $750, many image editors got real value for their money.
Unfortunately, After Corel took over Paint Shop Pro – they appear to have applied their vaunted Corel Reverse Midas Touch (think PhotoPaint, Picture Publisher and Word Perfect franchises). Right now, Paint Shop Pro is in a contest with Microsoft Vista for most bloated, slowest and unreliable software. Microsoft Vista wins the fatty title hands down, its nip tuck on slowest, but Corel cops the fragility title hands and program down again easily.
I downloaded the latest version of Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 for a trial run this week in the hopes that I would see some improvements in speed and reliability from the version I looked at well over a year ago. I took it for a spin on its introduction and found Paint Shop Pro to be way too slow for practical usability even with a 1GB dual core PC. Well I am happy to say that Paint Shop Pro on a 3GB dual core Windows XP SP3 machine is a little faster; but that exposed the second problem – seize ups. During test sessions on quick image editing, Paint Shop Pro seized up five times bringing the whole system down once. All the other photo edit programs including Corel’s own Painter and Photo Impact, performed flawlessly on the same set of images and in the same OS+hardware setup.
Now I can forgive the painful minute plus start up time, and the sporadically random long waits for some Paint Shop Pro commands to work, but having program crashes that obliterate a lot of your work and some times your total session – well that is a Back-to-the-Future rerun down late 1980’s PC Birthing Lane that I can do with out. So the writing is on the wall…Paint Shop Pro has had minimal improvements since it was launched and Corel has three other Paint/Image Editing programs in house … so Rest in Peace Corel Paint Shop Pro.
This is no April Fool’s joke – if you disagree, add a comment below. The best will get their choice of my last Corel Paint Shop Pro disks or a PhotoFinishes T-shirt.