Customer Reviews

Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(43)
4 star:		(36)
3 star:		(25)
2 star:		(21)
1 star:		(63)

 

 

Since Corel acquired Paint Shop Pro it's been all down hill. X3 is the Apollo 13 of paint programs. A total disaster. If you have more than a few images on your computer be prepared for a 2-3 hour installation ordeal. The program will crash and freeze several times as it attempts to catalog the entire contents of our computer. Thanks, but I already know where my pictures are, really. Should a "Pro" program be brought to it's knees repeatedly by a large catalog of images? Corel evidently thinks so.

The cause of all this trouble is the "Organizer". Man oh man what a train wreck. It's whole purpose in life seems to be so you can rate your pictures. I really don't need to rate my picture. Really? rate my own pictures... OK but I generally just delete the lousy ones but what ever. It would be of some use if you could use it like a browser, but no. There is no way the keep the "Organizer" open after selecting an image to edit. You can't even keep your place as opening an image automatically closes the "Organizer". When you go back your at square one go find it again. If I want to open several pictures from different folders... well let's just say it's much less than useless. If you don't want to use their exact work flow you are up a creek, a very slow creek as switching between editing and "Organizing" is glacial.

Well we got one new tool! Oh goody, I can do a lousy job of taking somebody out of a picture in one click. Whoop-de-doo! They did make the Text editing tool less stupid that it was, but it was pretty stupid. The new method is less awkward but still needs work.

What didn't we get? Well the majority of the editing tools are still 8 bit. If you want to work with your raws and maintain 16 or 32 bit per channel keep looking because there has been no improvement.

Now for the bad news when you decide to uninstall the demo. Corel really wants to put the screws to you for daring to uninstall their epic bloat ware. The uninstall literally took 45 minutes, It was stuck on 36% for at least 30 minutes.

In summary I would only recommend this to people I really don't like.

I'm an avid Photoshop/Lightroom user, but I like to examine other products that can improve my workflow and digital retouching. Photoshop is a great program, but simple changes are often time-consuming. Lightroom, while great 95% of the time, does not do everything for me. With that, when I saw that Corel released PSP X3, I was compelled to examine the product.

I've tried PSP in the past with mixed results, but thought I would try the new X3 version through the 30-day free trial available on Corel. I immediately had several problems. My machine is a workhorse (8GB, Phenom II X4), and while loading pictures into the catalog during initial startup, the software completely crashed multiple times on me. Okay, not off on a good foot, but I finally got my pictures loaded and began playing with some of the editing features. The menus were a little obtuse, and sometimes it is not easy to find editing options through the Full Editor. The Express Editor, while a little bit better, also had settings that were a little too deep in the menus. This is not really a flaw, though, since with a little bit of use I got fairly comfortable with the options.

I noticed that the presets in PSP X3 were really good and that I can really make a photo look good with less work (time) than I would need in Photoshop for the equivalent output. However, my gripes are as follows:

*Buttons for commands are really outdated and look rushed. They don't flow well with the rest of the program and they are somewhat hard to click consistently.
*Product clearly wasn't tested with any level of depth. On any given hour, PSP X3 will crash at least once, which is unacceptable, especially given that I've run this on such a powerful machine.
*The histogram isn't what you'd expect to see if you're used to Photoshop or looking at your camera's histogram. It could use some improvement.
*In one case, the white balance in "Express Editor" is completely inverted. While the function works, it registers 2000 as "warm" and "7500" as cold, when it should be reversed. This isn't a big gripe and can easily be fixed, but demonstrates the lack of testing.
*No LAB color mode. This isn't a big surprise, since PSP has never supported this, and truthfully, only a small fraction of people probably use LAB, but I'd like to see it eventually since it is a big part of my workflow.
*MY BIGGEST GRIPE: When you edit a photo and go back to the library (Organizer) view, it always puts your cursor back to the first photo of the library. For example, you have 250 photos from your kid's birthday party. You look at them in the bottom organizer panel and pick #115 to edit. If you close #115 and go back to Organizer, it will not remember your place, so the view will start from photo #1.

There is really a lot of potential here that could easily shine with a patch update. However, given Corel's history with X2 and X2-Ultimate, I don't expect them to address these issues anytime soon. If they fix a majority of these problems (name product stability and the Organizer issue), then I'd recommend it, especially for the price.

I have been a fan and a customer of Corel for many years, and upgraded to the X3 version of PaintShop because of its potential, but only to find it very disappointing. To start with, the activation will not recognize the Internet connection, so it forces you to call. OK, not too bad, I think. So, I call the number provided (an 800 number) only to find out that I have to call another number (not a toll free number, mind you) to activate the product I just purchased from Corel itself. This bothers me, but I thought it should not be too bad, so I checked their business hours, and called well within them (right in the middle of their business hours on a business day), but only to find a recording telling me that their office is closed. The call is then disconnected, and so am I from Corel. Enough is enough. This is becoming a joke.

Looking at the software itself, the idea of incorporating the photo organizer in the program was a big step back, not forward. On first load, it takes forever to index all the images I have in my computer (literally thousands of them, since I use them for work). It just reminds me of another version of the cheap Corel Snapfire, rather than a serious, professional product as this claims to be.

The GUI looks like it has been just thrown together, without all that much planning and thinking. Very awkward to use, especially with the integration of the organizer, which will return you to the first image, forcing you to scroll through your hundreds of images before you can get back to what you were working with. It forces you to use their own work-flow, which is quite awkward if you work with a lot of images from different locations. All in all, you might say you can get used to the new GUI, but that "organizer" is an absolute disaster, and should not have been embedded in the program.

I am afraid that my long term relationship with Corel as a customer is coming to an end. I have seen several of their products get worse and worse, especially if you plan to use them in a semi-professional or professional manner.

I installed the trail version on a Win 7 64 bit machine with 8 GB of RAM. The first several hours went fine but then the program stopped responding any time I tried to go from one component to another, that is between the Editor, Organizer and Express Lab. Doing a restart did not help the problem. I stopped trying to move from component to component and just tried to work in the Editor but the program shutdown while working there too. It looks like it has a lot of nice features and for the money it would probably be a very nice program if it ran without problems. Applying some of the effects takes quite a bit of time even with 8 GB of memory! One option I did like is that you can use "large icons" in the user interface which helps when the monitor is set to a high resolution. They were very small and hard to read on the default setting. I have not explored much of the program but if it continues not to run, I probably never will. Too bad, I think it has potential.

I can't say how good this software is at editing photos because all it ever did after installation was scanning my hard drive looking for photos. And since I have over 23,000 photos in the My Pictures folder, this was taking forever. Corel does not give you an option to stop this scan or opt out of it. It just does it as soon as you open Paintshop Photo Pro. I absolutely hate this invasive feature and uninstalled the software half an hour after installing it. I don't understand why I couldn't just open the pictures I want, like in PhotoShop, instead of waiting for these useless, time-consuming scans? This is one very unhappy consumer.

I'm going to put this into bullet statements so that this is quick, easy and painless. My experience with this program was anything but.

1. This software took a ridiculous amount of time to completely install and relinquish control of my machine back to me.

2. I installed this on a nearly new machine with Windows 7 only 1 week old. This program started causing reboot problems with my machine almost immediately. Starting the program and trying use the features seem to also take forever. I was a bit afraid to try and render something or save a large file.

3. The interface looks like a slick version of Windows 3.1 (which is old, people. 1992 old) And for its lack of ability in anything but 16 bit, it seems almost fitting.

4. As technically overwhelming as Adobe Photoshop is, this program was about as intuitive as a rock and often behaved like one. I gave it a fair shot and spent several weeks going back and forth with it.

5. Freezes a lot. Crashes a lot. Lost work several times. Several of the features failed to load properly but was only apparent when I tried to use it.

6. Want to try to get a secondary manual to help you through learning the software? Guess again, there aren't many choices at all. This isn't a very popular photo editing product in the photography world at all.

7. It took forever to uninstall this program and it left behind so many registry keys and bloatware files that I decided to just scrub the entire windows installation as I thought this program may have actually corrupted my Windows installation. THAT hasn't happened in years.

8. Some of the features were just ridiculous, too. Corel needs to decide if they're trying to build a web browser or a photo editing program. They're trying to be cool and do both, but it's just an awful sluggish attempt at both.

Epic Fail, folks. Epic.


...

I used Paint Shop Pro ever since it was Shareware - probably since Version 3.x - and had come to love this once great program. I would recomment it to all friends looking for an affordable, yet reliable alternative to PhotoShop from Adobe.

When in 2004 Corel purchased Jasc, inc. - maker of Paint Shop Pro - I was one of those, who voiced convern about the possible loss of Qualtiy.

Sadly, this has now occured.

Paint Shop Pro X3's Trial Version cannot be installed, as the installation hangs severel times due to an file permission error. Tech Support provided detailed, lengthy and cumbersome instructions on how to remidy this issue - NONE worked...

Best is, not to buy this programm - this will save you time, money and headaches.

Paintshop Pro (PSP) is an extremely capable graphical editing package- especially for its cost- which is about 1/10 the cost of Photoshop (PS) and 1/5 the cost of a PS upgrade. All the major features of PS are in PSP. The only difference is that the PSP presents those capabilities in a far more intuitive way. This is from the point of view of someone who has been working in Computer Graphics for almost 20 years. I have used PS since it first appeared on the Silicon Graphics over 10 years ago. About 5 years after using PS, I discovered PSP and it didn't take me long to abandon PS. Today I have both the latest version of PS and PSP, and I still find it faster and more intuitive to get work done in PSP.

So if you are a newbie, you will not have wasted your money if you bought PSP. It's a pretty small investment for a very capable piece of software.

For the users who already use an earlier version of PSP, if you own version X2, X3 is not a major leap forward. The significant differences are already highlighted in the product overview on this Amazon page. One thing I want to point out though to X2 users, is that while the new Organizer is more powerful, it is much slower. In X2 the organizer can simply be one of the tabs along with the other pictures. So switching to the organizer is fast. This is no longer possible. When you click on the organizer now, you have to wait (for me about 3 seconds) for it to kick in. This is a big deal to me since I do a lot of work compositing multiple images from multiple sources. It may not be a major issue for you if you don't do much of that.

For users who have a significantly earlier version of PSP, I definitely recommend upgrading to an X-series version. Almost every previously existing feature has been improved.

For users of PS, if you are happy with PS, stick with PS. Time is expensive. You don't want to spend time learning a new tool if you are already proficient and happy with an existing one. If you can't afford to keep shelling out half a grand for upgrades, you might consider switching to PSP. It's cheap by comparison so the risk is low- especially since a trial version is downloadable.

To an earlier review that remarked about the instability of PSP. When I received my version, there was an upgrade available for download, and I have used it for about 5 hours working with images which have as many as three dozen layers and with a resolution in excess of 4 megapixels, and have not experienced any problems.

I have used all versions of PaintShop Pro since version 5. I upgraded to PSPP X2 Ultimate, but discovered a bug where no Nikon RAW (NEF) files (at least from any Nikon "D" Camera) could be saved directly in uncompressed TIF format. This process is likely a very commonly used workflow for those using RAW, The TIF file that was created had 0 bytes and was unrecognized by PSD X2. After considerable hassle, I finally had a phone contact with a Corel support person who checked my issue directly and discovered that this was indeed a bug in the program. I received a refund (though, unfairly, I had to pay for the shipping of the defective disk). So, I went back to using X2, which does not support my Nikon D300 RAW files. When I saw the release of X3, I downloaded the free trial. Much to my dismay and disgust with the attitude of Corel Customer Service, this well-documented error has NOT been fixed. It was particularly upsetting since the examples advertising the new RAW features used NEF files. Is there any hope that Corel will ever care enough to address known bugs?

I am a devoted Corel PaintShop Photo user and had been looking forward to the working with the newly released X3. I have now had PaintShop Photo Pro X3 for a couple of weeks and am even happier.

PaintShop Photo Pro X3 has improved the workflow by enhancing the Organizer and how it works with the Express Lab and the Full Editor. Quickly organize, rate, tag and sort photos in the Organizer. Make automatic and user controled fixes in the enhanced Express Lab or move to the Editor for a full set of advanced photo-editing tools. The enhancements in the Express Lab mean that many photos can be edited without the full Editor. This and the Learning Center (context sensitive instructions) that has been a part of PaintShop Photo as long as I have used it make the application a wonderful choice for those new to digital photography.

I had not used the Organizer in previous versions because I didn't see much advantage to it. But the enhancements have changed my mind. The new Preview pane is perfect for quickly scanning through to cull photos or add tags and ratings. What really sold me on using Organizer is how well it is integrated with Express Lab and the full Editor. It is only a click away from Organizer to either the Express Lab or full Editor. Then when complete another click and back to Organizer.

The Enhanced Express Lab is a quick-editing mode containing most of the tools needed for editing without the use of selections and layers. With photos organized and easily available in Organizer just select the thumbnails of photos requiring editing and click Express Lab button. The addition of Local Tone Mapping, Color Balance, Brightness and Contrast, Sharpen and Noise Removal tools to the Express Lab means it can handle most basic photo editing. With tools that require a click or moving a few sliders the Express Lab makes for fast editing. If the use selections and layers is required to edit a photo just close Express Lab and open the photo in the Full Editor.

The application has also always offered professional quality image editing tools to keep enthusiasts happy. Support for additional RAW camera formats is a plus for many and improvement in saving editing steps to apply to multiple photos can be a real time saver. But The Smart Carver and Object Extractor are real photo and time savors. The Object Remover tool is still available but PSP X3 offers a new tool. Smart Carver, a seam carving tool can remove objects from an image. Smart Carver makes a photo narrower, wider, shorter, or longer without distorting content. It automatically detects and removes areas in the photo that have little detail. Changing the aspect ratio of a photo for printing is now easy without noticeably changing the image. Target a specific area to remove, regardless of its level of detail, and the tool becomes a method of removing objects. Or specify a selection to preserve and change the aspect ratio without changing or distorting a critical area.

Object Extractor is a new tool that isolates objects, to be copied to a new background or to have a new background pasted behind. It is a simple automated method of defining the selection. And like the Smart Carver is just a matter of tracing an enclosed area around the border of the object to be isolated and then filing in the selection. Then a click or two and it is done. It makes selecting objects that have fine detail on the edges a snap.