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Product Description
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Corel PaintShop Pro X4 gives passionate photographers more to love with hundreds of photo-editing features, a streamlined workspace, new pro-level effects and one-click sharing. Retouch photos faster. Create the perfectly exposed image or achieve a surreal, artistic effect with the HDR module. Remove distractions and combine the best elements from a series of shots with Photo Blend. Plus, have fun with the new Selective Focus feature and mimic expensive tilt-shift lenses to turn a scene into a miniature world. Managing and editing all your photos is easier with redesigned workspaces and dual monitor support. When you're ready to show your best photos, sharing to sites like Facebook and Flickr is just a click away!
Key Features and Benefits
Professional-quality tools in a streamlined, intuitive workflow
With PaintShop Pro X4, you get the photo-editing tools you need to create the professional look you want. Fix common flaws with standard editing tools. Retouch photos quickly with adjustment tools and filter effects that let you extract unwanted objects, blend colors and apply professional lighting effects.
Stunning effects
Take advantage of over 50 adjustment filters and 112 special effects to fine-tune your work. Merge photos taken with different exposures to create a stunning, perfectly exposed image with the new HDR module. Or experiment with the tonal range to get an intriguing, surrealistic look. The HDR tools in PaintShop Pro X4 are ideal for revealing hidden details in backlit scenes like sunsets. Try it with a series of photos taken using the auto-bracket feature on your DSLR.
Get the look of tilt-shift photography without expensive lenses using the new Selective Focus feature. Turn a scene into a miniature world or use it to add depth of field.
Combine photos easily
The new Photo Blend tool lets you combine the best elements from similar shots to create your ideal photo. For example, remove unwanted cars or people from a street scene, or take the best smiles from a series of group shots.
Impressive results--fast
With new performance updates, including GPU optimizations, PaintShop Pro X4 is the fastest version yet. More real-time effects--including Noise Reduction, Vibrancy, Tone Mapping and others--let you see the results as you work. Start up time is drastically reduced, plus the interface is faster and more responsive.
Streamlined workflow
Enjoy an easy and intuitive editing experience with tabbed workspaces that mirror your natural workflow. Move freely between three modes:
- Manage--quickly browse, tag and organize your photo collections
- Adjust--easily make powerful adjustments and quick fixes
- Edit--take advantage of professional tools for photo editing, image composition and graphic design
You can also access the Organizer directly from any workspace, making it easy to review and rate your photos. Use trays to gather and access images from several folders and refer to the new Shot Info panel to instantly see details about the camera and image. New dual monitor support lets you manage your photos on one screen while editing on the other. Plus, try new Adjustment Layers to experiment without changing your source image.
More detailed photos
Brighten shadowy areas of your photo without changing the rest of the image with Fill Light. Try the Clarity filter to draw attention to subtle details, dramatically increasing the texture and depth of your photos.
Custom borders
Apply a custom fade to the outer edge of a photo to emphasize the focal point of your image. With the new Vignette effect, you can use intuitive sliders to control the appearance of the edges by choosing the shape, color and tone, and adjusting the amount of blur, glow and feathering.
Robust RAW Lab
Get a better look at your images with a larger preview area in the redesigned RAW Lab, which now supports more camera models and opens your images faster.
Built-in social media sharing
Share your photos faster with one-click sharing to Facebook and Flickr straight from the Organizer window.
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Professional editing power
New! HDR tools: A totally new set of HDR tools in PaintShop Pro X4 is designed to let you take full advantage of photos taken with auto-bracketing features on DSLRs.
You can use Exposure Merge to combine photos taken with different exposure settings to create perfectly exposed images. Ideal for high-contrast backlit scenes, such as sunsets and interior window shots, Exposure Merge lets you bring out color and detail in the foreground, midground, and background areas. PaintShop Pro X4 has built-in HDR-adjustment presets, or you can save and reuse your favorite configurations as a preset.
For photographers who use auto-bracketing often, Batch Merge is a time-saving tool for quickly processing HDR sets. It lets you merge multiple bracketed sets of photos at the same time to achieve a custom, uniform look across a series of HDR photos. Batch Merge lets you save your results to a 32-bit HDR file so you can refine it later. In some cases, this might be all you need to get the look you were hoping for. In other cases, you'll want to adjust the results in Exposure Merge.
New! Photo Blend: Getting a group shot where everyone looks their best just got a lot easier with Photo Blend. This new feature lets you combine the best features from a series of photos to create a perfect image. For example, you can swap out a blinking photo subject from one picture for a better shot of that person. And if the only thing that stands between a good photo and a perfect one is an unwanted element, Photo Blend makes it easy to remove unwanted portions of images. You can even get creative by showing the same person multiple times in a single photo.
New! Fill Light and Clarity filter: Using this one powerful filter, you can fine-tune the brightness and clarity of your photos. The Fill Light/Clarity filter simplifies brightening shadows or darkening light areas without affecting other portions of the image. You can also soften or sharpen subtle yet important details in shots.
New! Selective Focus: This new effect lets you transform a real shot into a miniature model. Selective Focus, often referred to as a tilt-shift effect, lets you intuitively adjust the depth of field and increase saturation to create the illusion of a toy-like miniature scene from a photo. You can also use Selective Focus to draw attention to important parts of an image by blurring out busy surrounding details.
New! Vignette: PaintShop Pro X4 makes this classic photo effect easier than ever to create, tweak, and apply. The new Vignette feature adds a soft outer border that fades to white or black so you can draw attention to the most important part of your shot. Easy-to-use controls let you fine-tune the shape of the edges and the amount of blur, glow, and feathering. In addition, an instant preview lets you quickly see how the effect looks.
Enhanced! Camera RAW Lab: The Camera RAW Lab is now easier to use with a larger preview area and an improved histogram that help you quickly assess your adjustments. In addition, new highlight recovery options mean that you can restore detail in overexposed areas.
Enhanced! 16-bit support: PaintShop Pro X4 has extended 16-bit support to a range of tools and adjustments, giving you even more precision and flexibility when working with RAW formats.
Over 20 tools have been upgraded to 16-bit support, including the Scratch Remover, Paint Brush, Object Remover, Color Replacer, Warp Brush, Mesh Warp, and Background Eraser.
Performance
Enhanced! Application speed: PaintShop Pro X4 has more than 75 performance updates, including GPU optimizations, that help ensure a fast, efficient working environment. Effects, such as Noise Reduction, Vibrancy and Tone Mapping, can now be applied in real time. Skin Smoothing, Smart Carver, Depth of Field, Blur, and Smart Photo Fix have also been refined to offer enhanced speed and performance. In addition, Camera RAW decoding is faster than ever.
Enhanced! Full-screen review: The Quick Review feature has been tweaked to offer full-screen image review so you can quickly and easily view, delete, rotate, and rate your photos.
Usability
New! MUI support: Great if you're working on a multilingual dual-byte system, new native multilingual user interface (MUI) support means that you can display text from multiple interface languages on a single PC. Now, there's never a problem working with photos that have foreign characters in their filename.
Enhanced! Workspace: PaintShop Pro X4 has been redesigned so you can move between photo workflows in a click. The application has three tabbed workspaces each dedicated to a different stage in the digital-photography workflow. The Manage workspace gives you everything you need to review and organize your photos. You can find the most frequently used image-correction tools in the Adjust workspace, and the Edit workspace provides you with a full range of professional-level editing tools. No matter which workspace you're in, the Organizer palette is always displayed, so there's no need to go to a separate workspace or application to find more photos.
New! Dual monitor support: Because you can never have enough screen space, PaintShop Pro X4 lets you manage your photos on one monitor and edit on another.
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Customer Reviews
As a side note, I did keep Adobe's Lightroom 3. It's excellent and I have Lightroom 3 linked to Paintshop Pro X4 where I can go directly into Paintshop from Lightroom and do any edits I want to all the photos that are in my Adobe Lightroom 3 library with a click of a button AND Paintshop will recognize and retain any minor edits I may have done in Lightroom if I choose. I really do like the Lightroom 3 and Paintshop Pro X4 combo that I now have.
Paintshop Pro X4 is really a fantastic photo program.
EDITED TO ADD:
Here's how to link/add Pantshop Pro X4 as the external editor to Adobe's Lightroom 3:
Firstly, I'm using Windows 7.
To chose Paintshop Pro X4 as Lightroom 3's external editor, click on LR3's menu item called "Edit". When that opens, then click on "Preferences". Then, when that opens, click on the "External Editing" tab. There you will see a heading halfway down the page called "Additional External Editor". Click on "Choose" to open up the browser. At that point, a browse type window will open. When it opens, look for a folder called "Program Files (x86)". You may need to double-click your "C" drive(or whatever letter that represents your main operating drive) to open it up so you can locate the folder called "Program Files(x86)". The "Program Files(x86)" is where your Corel program and execute files are located. It's really easy to locate the "Program Files(x86)" in your "C" drive as all folders are alphabetized. When you find the "Program Files(x86)" folder, double-click that folder. When that "Program Files(x86)" folder opens, you will look for the "Corel" folder. When you find it, double-click that one. When that one opens, look for the "Corel Paintshop Pro X4" folder, then double-click that folder to open it.
ALMOST DONE. When the "Corel Paintshop Pro X4" folder opens, scroll down to a file called "Corel Paintshop Pro.exe". This is the execute file for opening Photoshop in LR3. Double-click that file to choose it.
Now, to finish, just left-click "OK" to close the "Preferences" window. YOU'RE DONE! Paintshop Pro X4 is now your external editor. To use Photoshop in LR3, open LR3 and right click on any photo that's there and a menu of items will open up. Choose "Edit in" and you will see Paintshop Pro as a choice. Just click it and it will open up a small window for you to choose from a couple self-explanatory items and then Paintshop will automatically open up with the photo you chose. It's very quick and very easy to use. It works great.
Let's start with speed - PSPX4 opens fast, loads images fast, and just overall performs complex tasks much more quickly and without a lot of the lag time found in other programs. The workspace is really streamlined and can easily be customized to your preferences. I use a dual-monitor setup for processing images and creating art and PSPX4 fully supports dual monitor. Set it up once and save it as a preferred workspace and it's always there when you want it. And if you're not using a dual monitor setup - well, try it - you'll see how a dual monitor setup and PSPX4 work seamlessly to further enhance your own particular workflow.
Most all the tools within PSPX4 have been upgraded as well! I like to bring in RAW images (I'm using Nikon's NEF format) and give an overall "fix" for things like brightness and contrast before bringing them into PSPX4's Edit mode. The larger preview area in the RAW Lab certainly helps! And the ability to work on 16-bit files is HUGE given today's cameras.
The HDR tools are also superb - I like to shoot a lot of "auto-bracketed" shots and using exposure merge allows me to find that perfect balance of light and contrast and sharpness - seriously, my images now seem to "pop" with color. I have complete control over the overall tone and mood of my images!
The Manage tab allows me to quickly scan for other images where I may want to use a certain element in the current project. Again - dual monitor support makes it easy to keep my windows where I need them - easy to see and easy to manipulate.
I think PSPX4's performance and speed has probably been the biggest improvement in this version. It helps to have a system that can take advantage of that, of course - but I will say the application is amazingly fast and the tools work without hesitation (none of that painful lag time) as I work on very large and complex images - large file size and multi-layer projects.
From simple tasks such as brightening your P&S camera images to full blown remodeling of large scale RAW images and everything in between - I'm finding PSPX4 handles it all. I can be as simple or as complex as I want and I don't have to worry about the software slowing me down or curtailing my creativity. Perhaps that's what I enjoy the most now with PSPX4 - I can focus on being creative instead of worrying about software constraints!
For me, PSPX4 gives me all of this and at a fraction of the cost of other more expensive programs.
Cheers,
Gino
Just a few of the bugs I've encountered so far:
- When I switch between images, the layers panel fails to keep up. It displays layers from the previous image while I'm trying to work on the current one. To get it to catch up, I have to switch between images several times.
- When I modify selections (contract, expand, invert, so on) I get random circular selections and omissions within the selected area. Trying to remove these areas is nearly impossible other than by backing out of the process entirely (which still means you cannot perform the intended process because the same error reappears.)
- The PSP window (the application -the whole thing) disappears randomly when dialogs come up (such as for layer properties). You can usually get it back (it's minimized), but what in the world? You're in the middle of working on something and suddenly the whole window just "poof" disappears.
This software is not ready for users. It is riddled with bugs. Quality control/assurance appears to have been shoddy to nonexistent. Added features are of questionable value and seem to be aimed at people who don't really need this kind of program in the first place.
I recommend PREVIOUS editions of Paint Shop Pro. It is far less expensive than The Emperor's New Clothes (Adobe Photoshop), but this X4 edition just STINKS.
Stay away from this until it gets fixed.
Horrible.
After contacting Corel for help, they said it was a walmart copy and they wont service it.
Do not buy !!!
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