Last year I wrote RIP: Corel PaintShop Pro on this blog and made the following comments:
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 V2 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 and again easily.
Well I am a sucker for punishment and downloaded the full trial version of the new Corel Paint Shop Pro Version 3 in order to see if Corel had managed to fix anything. Here are my observation based on running:
Windows 7 on 2.1GHz Dual Core machine with 4GB of RAM and 500GB HDisk with 80% freespace
Testing was done with no other program running but Paint Shop Pro V3 and then Adobe Photoshop CS3
Here are the results:
| Measure | Corel PshopPro V3 | Photoshop CS3 |
| Install | 30min | 24min |
| Memory Used | 476MB | 386MB |
| Start up | 11sec | 9sec |
| Load 16MB Image | 5sec | 4sec |
| Curves Correction | 1sec | <1sec |
| Impressionist Plugin | 21sec | 24sec |
| Duplicate Layer | 1sec | <1sec |
| Convert to B+W | 4sec | <1sec |
| Rotate | 1sec | <1sec |
| Blur Gaussian 20 | 10sec | <1sec |
| Sharpen | 3sec | 3sec |
| Unsharp mask 20 | 13sec | 2sec |
| Save As JPG Max | 11sec | 8sec |
| Size of Final JPG | 51MB | 48MB |
The bottom line is that Photoshop is distinctly faster than Corel Paint Shop Pro version 3, uses less memory and of course provides a wider feature set; but at $715 at Amazon for CS3 Extended versus Corel PaintShop Pro V3 at $100 – there is certainly a value trade off.
But the biggest news by far is that Windows 7-like, Version 3 of PaintShop Pro seems to have eliminated all the crashes I was experiencing in Version 2. In three days of fairly intensive testing, Version 3 has crashed only once [ditto for Photoshop CS3]. Big improvement.
Equally important for end users is the dramatic improvement in response time – still not in Photoshop territory [only one command , the Impressionist plugin, was slightly faster than in Photoshop CS3]. But this is a marked improvement on being 50-70% slower than Photoshop in our previous tests.
The size of the program is about 20% bigger than Photoshop CS3 – I don’t have comparisons with Version 2 of PaintShop Pro. So whats-new improvements like multi-photo editing a la Lightroom, Seam Carver, and direct video editing [about 20% of my web still images come from HD video image captures] will have to carry the day. And the active Learning Center plus Express lab simplify learning and using Paint Shop Pro V3.
I am looking for a simple and fast Photo Editor to compliment Photoshop – sort of like the handy, light Panasonic 10x zoom camera that goes with me everywhere while I reserve the Canaon SLR for major shoots. But I will wait one more version of Paint Shop Pro to see if they can improve the response time even further and add more to the Express Lab and multi-photo features. But clearly, Corel Paint Shop Pro version 3 is like Windows 7 [and SP1], on the road to redemption.