Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2

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Product Features

• The ideal choice for any aspiring photographer's digital darkroom; an array of graphics tools and creative effects help you transform their photos into one-of-a-kind artistic images
• Fix brightness, color, and photo flaws in a few clicks; use precision editing tools to create the picture you want; give photos a unique, exciting look using hundreds of special effects, and more
• One-of-a-kind Express Lab helps you quickly view and fix dozens of photos in the time it used to take to edit a few
• HDR Photo Merge helps you combine two or more photos taken at different exposures, and then automatically dodges and burns to bring out the contrast
• Includes a built-in Learning Center to help you get started; it's the easiest way to get professional-looking photos--fast

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 8 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000VJTL1Y
• Item model number: PSPPX2ENPC
• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 5, 2007
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (92 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #89 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

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Product Description

Amazon.com
Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 is the ideal choice for any aspiring photographer's digital darkroom. Fix brightness, color, and photo flaws in a few clicks; use precision editing tools to create the picture you want; give photos a unique, exciting look using hundreds of special effects, and much more! Plus, the NEW one-of-a-kind Express Lab helps you quickly view and fix dozens of photos in the time it used to take to edit a few. Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 even includes a built-in Learning Center to help you get started, it's the easiest way to get professional-looking photos - fast!

Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 is the ideal choice for any aspiring photographer's digital darkroom.

Introducing Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2
Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 is the ideal digital photography software for users who want professional-looking photos and new ways to unlock their creative potential. With the widest selection of photo-editing features--ranging from automatic tools when you need results fast or precision controls for fine-tuning--Paint Shop Pro Photo provides a depth of functionality that grows with users as their skills and knowledge advance. Downloading, viewing, orting, and quickly processing photos is a breeze, and users can learn as they go with a variety of learning aids in the application. With version X2, award-winning Paint Shop Pro Photo continues to set the standard for easy-to-use, powerful software at an affordable price.

Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 continues to focus on photo editing, making it the ideal choice for any aspiring photographer's digital darkroom. The exciting new features in Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 include the following:

• Express Lab--A new streamlined mode of Paint Shop Pro Photo helps users quickly view and fix dozens of photos in the time it used to take to edit just a few. Now users can crop, rotate, and fix their photos without having to open them individually.
• Graphite Interface Theme--A new, darker theme for Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 makes photos look their absolute best while users edit them.
• HDR Photo Merge--Users can take advantage of their camera's autobracketing feature and combine multiple exposures of high-contrast scenes, which are otherwise impossible to capture adequately.
• Integrated Clarify Control--Users can achieve incredible results with HDR Photo Merge by applying automatic dodging and burning. The enhanced Black and White Film dialog box also provides a Clarify control, so users can create dynamic, high-contrast images that mimic the use of black-and-white film with a color filter on the lens.
• Makeover Tool Modes--The suite of easy-to-use retouching tools grows in Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 to include the new Thinify and Eye Drop modes, which give super results, fast.
• Layer Styles--Users can easily apply effects such as embossing, drop shadows, glows, and even reflections, which automatically update whenever the underlying layer is edited.
• Visible Watermarks--Users can take credit for their work by adding watermarks to photos. All it takes is a few clicks before printing or uploading proof copies.
• Workflow Improvements--Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 makes it easier to use photos in documents, presentations, and Web pages through the new Save for Office and Copy Special options, plus redesigned Resize and Save As dialog boxes.
• Auto-Preserve Originals--Original photos are now automatically preserved when users save an edited version. This new feature provides a safety net in case users want to return to the original version.

The Express Lab helps users quickly process large batches of photos.

Supporting these features is the award-winning Learning Center, which help new users get up to speed quickly. The Learning Center is laid out in workflow order, so users can easily identify what they'd like to do with their photos. The Learning Center is truly integrated into the application, so selecting a topic automatically launches the corresponding tool. Unlike products with limited feature sets, Paint Shop Pro Photo provides a full range of functionality, from quick, single-click adjustments to full manual controls. Many common photo-editing tasks are much easier to perform in Paint Shop Pro Photo than in comparable applications, such as Adobe Photoshop Elements. Examples include the following:

• Replacing color selectively--Change the color of any object in a photo with just one click of the Color Changer tool while preserving the shading and texture of the original object. Even changing a dark color to a light color requires just a single click, as opposed to the difficult, multistep manual process required in Adobe Photoshop Elements.
• Correcting perspective--Turn any lens into a tilt-swing perspective correction lens with the Perspective Correction feature. Simply line up four corners on a photo element that should be square, and double-click. Photoshop Elements requires a complex process involving multiple controls.
• Blurring the background selectively--Draw attention to an object of interest in a photo with the Depth of Field effect. This feature simulates the use of a low lens aperture setting.
• Sprucing up photo subjects--Apply tooth-whitening, slimming, suntanning, and other enhancements with a suite of Makeover tool modes.
• Giving images an older look--Take photos back in time by using the seven different historical effects in the Time Machine feature.
• Removing unwanted objects in photos--Outline an object to remove, and a background area to use to replace it, and the object is gone. This technique is particularly useful for objects that are larger than the area you use for the replacement texture. In Photoshop Elements, this task requires cloning, which often leads to noticeable repeat patterns.
• Removing purple fringe--Detect and remove the colored fringe that appears along high-contrast edges in many digital camera photos by using the Purple Fringe Remover.
• Simulating infrared film--Simulate the ethereal effect of infrared photography. The Infrared Film effect even includes options to simulate the flare and film grain qualities of this unique film type.
• Importing and exporting CMYK format files--Benefit from fully supported color management, with ICC-standard color profiles, including importing and exporting CMYK format files.
• Merging auto-bracketed images--Take advantage of a digital camera's auto-bracket feature to create images that retain all the detail of shadow and highlight areas in a photo.

Process Your Photos Like the Pros
Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 has a variety of tools and features that allow users to quickly process vast quantities of images without sacrificing quality. Whether users work in offices, in photography studios, or at home, their ability to quickly create top-notch images is critical. Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 helps users get the end results they demand with a variety of high-quality, intuitive, and time-saving tools and features.

New! Express Lab:
Nothing has fueled the digital camera revolution like the ability to take large numbers of pictures without having to worry about the cost. As a result of this newfound freedom, however, users are faced with the daunting tasks of viewing, deleting, and fixing all of those downloaded photos.

The Express Lab is ideal for processing an entire folder of photos all at once--without having to sacrifice power for speed. It helps users sort through a vast quantity of images, allowing them to view and process the photos without having to open each one.

Advanced users can fine-tune photos by using a histogram and separate controls for shadows, brightness, highlights, and saturation. Less experienced users can easily refine their photos by using the Suggest Settings feature of the Smart Photo Fix tool. The Express Lab also offers a toolset that lets users easily perform many common editing tasks, such as cropping and straightening photos and removing red-eye and blemishes. Users can also assign ratings to their photos, so they can quickly find their favorites.

Take credit for your work by adding watermarks to photos.

The new Save for Office and Copy Special commands help you optimize images for their intended destination.

New! Visible Watermark:
Professional photographers and hobbyists alike want to put their stamp on the photos they take and share. The Visible Watermark feature lets users add a discreet watermark to their photos to remind viewers who took the shot and to help safeguard against misuse of their images. This new feature simplifies the task of adding a logo or other graphic as a watermark, and users can choose from options such as embossing to give their photos a subtle, professional look.

New & Enhanced! Auto-Preserve Originals and Save As:
Users don't have to worry about overwriting their original photos, thanks to the new Auto-Preserve Originals option. The first time a user saves an image, a backup copy of the original is automatically created one level deeper in the folder hierarchy. The original can easily be restored by using the Restore Original command in the File menu.

Paint Shop Pro Photo is renowned for the number of file formats users can save to. The improved Save As command helps users quickly choose the formats they use most often by listing common and recently used ones at the top of the file format list.

New! Save for Office and Copy Special:
Preparing an image for use in documents, in presentations, or on the Web can be tricky. The Save for Office command removes the guesswork by automatically optimizing an image for its intended use, thereby avoiding problems with file size, performance, or printing.

When users copy and paste images into other applications, the new Copy Special command prepares the image based on its intended purpose. The resizing function is built in, ensuring that no unnecessary image data is added to the document.

E-mailing:
Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 lets users e-mail photos as embedded files or attachments. A preview feature lets users double-check their images before sending them and check a running count on the size of selected files.

Color Management:
The Color Management engine lets users read and save ICC-standard color profile data in their files, which ensures that on-screen colors match printed colors. In addition, Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 supports CMYK input and output for commercial printing.

Makeover tool modes let you quickly and easily touch up the appearance of photo subjects.

Discover Editing Tools You Can't Find Anywhere Else
Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 has a powerful toolset that can fix nearly any digital photo imperfection. If the problem stems from the quality of the image produced by the camera, a user can apply quick, easy corrections with a series of time-saving tools. If photo subjects don't look their best, their appearance can be spruced up faster and easier than ever before.

New & Enhanced! Makeover Tool:
Everyone wants to look their best in a photo. To that end, Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 includes a suite of Makeover tool modes that let users quickly and easily touch up the appearance of photo subjects. The professional-strength Makeover tool contains the following modes:

• New! Thinify Mode--makes photo subjects look thinner
• New! Eye Drop Mode--takes the red out of irritated, bloodshot eyes
• Enhanced! Blemish Fixer Mode--removes blemishes from photo subjects
• Enhanced! Suntan Mode--adds color to pale, washed-out skin
• Toothbrush Mode--quickly whitens discolored teeth

The Color Changer tool lets you easily change colors in your digital images.

With the Perspective Correction tool, you can fix buildings, landmarks, or objects in your photos that appear in the wrong perspective.

Quickly remove purple fringe from your photos.

The Object Remover makes it easy to remove unwanted or difficult-to-clone portions of images and fills in the removed detail with portions of the remaining photo.

Color Changer Tool:
The Color Changer tool lets users easily change colors in their digital images. For example, users can easily change the color of an object in a photo, such as a car or a piece of clothing. Rather than simply replacing a color, the Color Changer tool detects and analyzes variations in brightness caused by shading and texture, and then it makes the necessary adjustments to the new color to produce a realistic recoloring effect.

Noise Removal:
"Noise" artifacts--small specks of color that interfere with the clarity of the image--are one of the most common problems in digital photography. Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 gives users two noise-removal options. The One Step Noise Removal command offers one-step, automatic noise removal.

The Digital Camera Noise Removal command allows users to precisely control how these same corrections are applied. This feature has been favorably compared to specialized noise-removal plug-ins that cost as much as Paint Shop Pro Photo X2!

Perspective Correction Tool:
This longtime favorite gives users the power and versatility of an expensive tilt-correction lens. With the Perspective Correction tool, users can fix buildings, landmarks, or objects in their photos that appear in the wrong perspective or that were taken from an angle other than directly in front. Users can simply line up the four corner points with a shape that should be rectangular to adjust the entire image

Purple Fringe Removal:
The One Step Purple Fringe Fix command gets rid of the purple glow that sometimes appears in digital photos around edges of objects under high-contrast conditions.

Straighten Tool:
Users can easily straighten crooked images by simply specifying a line along an image feature that should be horizontal or vertical, such as the horizon or a building.

Background Eraser Tool:
Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 lets users selectively erase pixels with the Background Eraser tool. For example, in a photo of a mountain range, users can erase the sky or isolate an object from the surrounding image area. When the background behind photo subjects is erased, fine-edged detail around hair or fur is retained.

Object Remover:
If the only thing that stands between a good photo and a perfect one is an unwanted element--a lamppost, a tree, even a bystander--the Object Remover can help. The Object Remover makes it easy to remove unwanted or difficult-to-clone portions of images and fills in the removed detail with portions of the remaining photo. Just outline the object to remove, and a background area to use to replace it, and the object is gone.

The Crop to New Image feature lets you quickly separate individual images from group scan

The HDR Photo Merge feature helps users get the most out of their digital cameras.

Easily correct distorted images with Lens Distortion Correction filters.

Enhanced! Crop Tool:
Users who scan multiple images at the same time will love the enhanced Crop tool. The new Crop to New Image feature automatically creates a new file from the cropped area and keeps the original full scan open, so users can easily separate individual image files from the group scan.

Enhance Photos Using Powerful, Easy-To-Use Tools
Paint Shop Pro Photo is renowned for being user-friendly--that's because user feedback has always played a huge role in its development. From requesting one-click automatic fixes that take the guesswork out of image correction to insisting on advanced image-editing tools, the user has spoken, and Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 has responded. And as digital cameras have evolved, Paint Shop Pro Photo has kept pace, so that users can get as much out of their photos as their cameras offer.

New! HDR Photo Merge:
Many digital cameras have an auto-bracket feature, which lets users take multiple shots of the same scene, each with a different exposure level. This feature is ideal for photos taken in high-contrast scenes, such as a sunset. One shot adjusts the exposure to capture the shadows, while another shot adjusts the exposure to capture bright areas. The HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photo Merge feature lets users combine auto-bracketed photos to create a photo that retains the critical detail of the images being combined. While ideal for photos shot using a tripod and auto-bracketing, this feature can automatically align images captured with handheld cameras using manual exposure adjustments.

Enhanced! Black and White Film Effect:
Users can easily create dynamic black-and-white photos by simulating the effects of shooting using black-and-white film with colored filters. Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 gives users the full creative control of the Channel Mixer command by letting them select from a virtually infinite range of color combinations within an intuitive, easy-to-use interface. The enhanced Black and White Film dialog box also provides a Clarify control, so users can create dynamic, high-contrast images that mimic the use of black-and-white film with a color filter on the lens.

One Step Photo Fix and Smart Photo Fix:
The One Step Photo Fix command automatically applies six common photo corrections to an image. All the user needs to do is select the command.

The Smart Photo Fix analyzes a photo and suggests settings for auto-corrections of color, brightness, sharpness, and saturation used in One Step Photo Fix. Completely flexible, users can apply the suggested settings or experiment further by manually fine-tuning the settings. At any point, if users decide that they prefer the results of the initially suggested fix, they can quickly reapply the suggested settings. Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 gives users the flexibility to experiment freely with confidence, knowing that they can always revert to their starting point.

Depth of Field Effect:
Paint Shop Pro Photo lets users draw attention to a specific area of an image. The Depth of Field effect applies focus to a region of a photo while applying an out-of-focus blur to the rest of the image. This allows users to easily replicate the look of limited depth of field, an effect that usually requires precise manual lens aperture adjustments.

Advanced Adjustments:
Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 offers advanced users the professional-level tools and features that are usually found only in expensive image-editing applications. These advanced features include the following:

• Curves and Levels Adjustments--The Curves and Levels features in Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 give users exceptional control over some of the most critical imaging adjustments. The Curves dialog box includes a histogram, so photographers can easily and intuitively fine-tune their work. Three automatic settings let less-experienced users optimize the contrast and color levels in their images with a few clicks.
• Histogram Adjustment--With Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, the Histogram Adjustment feature lets users display the tonal range of an image and fine-tune the balance of shadows, midtones, and highlights. More advanced users can use this feature to manually correct exposure.
• Adjustment Layers--Whenever a tonal or color change is applied to an image, the image's information is altered, which means that the image ultimately starts to degrade. The advantage of using adjustment layers is that they do not permanently modify the image layers themselves. Advanced users love working with adjustment layers in Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 because they offer a great way to adjust the color or tone of underlying layers without actually modifying the pixels of those layers. In addition, users can add multiple adjustment layers to test various color corrections or to see how several corrections look when they're combined.

Lens Distortion Correction Filters:
Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 provides excellent Lens Distortion Correction filters that help users correct common photo distortions, such as fish-eye, barrel, and pincushion.

Create One-Of-A-Kind Photos
Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 offers an array of graphics tools and creative effects that help users transform their photos into one-of-a-kind artistic images. While professional-strength image-correction tools have always been at the core of the application, Paint Shop Pro Photo is also renowned for letting users push their artistic boundaries. Whether making a photo look like it was taken long ago with a bygone era's film and camera technology, or adding stunning artistic effects, users of Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 can unleash their creativity.

New! Layer Styles:
This feature lets users apply a variety of artistic effects to a layer, such as Drop Shadow, Emboss, and Reflection, without having to leave the Layer Properties dialog box.

Film and Filters:
Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 offers users a range of effects inspired by classic film and filter types. Users can experiment with a variety of film-effect and filter-effect combinations to produce interesting, eye-catching results. Users can also simulate the effect of using color filters on the lens of a camera by applying a Creative Filter effect, or they can apply a Film Look to simulate the effect of using different types of film in a traditional camera.

Layer Styles lets you easily apply artistic effects to your images.

Time Machine:
The Time Machine offers users a tour of photographic history by letting them see what their photos would look like if they had been taken in another era. With a range of settings based on photo styles from the 1830s to the 1980s, users can easily send their photos back in time. A live preview lets users see the evolution of photography on a single image.

Warp Brush:
The Warp Brush lets users easily create caricatures of their photos or photo subjects by distorting the pixels in a particular area of the photo.

Effects Browser:
The Effects Browser lets users preview an enormous range of effects before applying them to an image.

Vector Drawing Tools:
Using the Text tool, users can add descriptive or decorative text to an image, and the text can be easily edited and formatted. Using the Preset Shapes tool, users can add predefined shapes--such as callouts, arrows, flowers, and gears--to images. The range of predefined shapes has been expanded in Paint Shop Pro Photo X2.

Enhanced! Picture Tubes:
A longtime user favorite, the Picture Tube tool lets users paint on their photos with a collection of professionally designed artistic elements. For example, users can add butterflies and beetles to a picnic setting, fill an aquarium with fish, or frame a picture with holly. Picture Tubes are available in a variety of themes, and users can also create their own graphics to use with the Picture Tube tool. Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 has several new Picture Tubes, giving users more options when enhancing their photos.

Enhanced! Picture Frames and Photo Edges:
Using picture frames and photo edges, users can easily add eye-catching final touches to their images. Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 provides a variety of picture frame styles, and the frames are editable, so users can tweak them or create their own. The addition of new picture frames and photo edges in Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 offers users even more creative possibilities.

Product Description
Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 is the ideal choice for any aspiring photographer's digital darkroom. Fix brightness, color, and photo flaws in a few clicks and use precision editing tools to create the picture you want. Give photos a unique, exciting look using hundreds of special effects, and much more! Plus, the new one-of-a-kind Express Lab helps you quickly view and fix dozens of photos in the time it used to take to edit a few. Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 even includes a built-in Learning Center to help you get started, it's the easiest way to get professional-looking photos - fast!

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

234 of 241 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Probably the Best Software for Advanced Editing in its Price Range, October 1, 2007

By	Scott Fisher - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Lets face it, Adobe Photoshop sets the standard for photo editing, but it's not in most people's price range. The latest version of Photoshop is between six and ten times more expensive Than Corel Paint Shop Pro PHOTO X2. (Wow, what a horrendously long and annoying name.) Photo X2 (as I'll call it from now on) approaches Photoshop in complete feature richness and with a decent interface, yet at a fraction of the price.

Notice I said "feature richness" in describing Photo X2. If you are a relative beginner or you don't retouch your photos in certain ways, I'd actually recommend Photoshop Elements over Photo X2. Elements has a better interface, more "automagic" features and works faster than Photo X2 and is about the same price.

I've used Photoshop, Elements, Corel Photo Paint and also JASC Paint Shop Pro (and some other things, too). So why didn't I buy the latest version of Elements or Photoshop instead?

1. Photoshop is too expensive for me to justify for my personal and hobby use. I use it at my work for image editing since my workplace pays for the software license there. But when I'm paying I'm looking more closely at price vs. performance. Though Photoshop has the performance, it doesn't rate so well on the price scale.

2. Elements is really nice for me to use about 85% of the time, but then there is the horrible 15% of the time that I want to use a feature that Adobe has gutted out of their software for the "Elements" version. Then I have to play around with copying the image into another program (some of them free) to adjust the curves (or whatever) and then copy it back in afterwards. The gutted feature set of Elements is a large, though occasional, annoyance. Plus I really don't use most of the fluffy side of its feature set (like "quick fixes," or "photo creations").

I think for people like me, Photo X2 is a better choice because it gives most of the advanced features that Adobe guts out of Elements at the same price point. These would be features like a curves dialog, batch processing, creating/saving masks (and many more).

Photo X2 has a lot of good sides. It can do a lot. It produces high quality results. It is much more feature rich than Elements. It has very good help files. It even has some nifty unexpected features built-in like HDR image mapping and RAW file support for many digital SLR cameras (including mine).

The down side is that in some places the interface isn't quite as good as Adobe's. It's still pretty usable, but there are minor annoyances. In Photoshop you can zoom/shrink the view and pan an image around while a dialog box is open so you can see the results easily and in a large preview. In Photo X2, you can't zoom in/out and move things around except in the before/after view in the dialogs themselves (not a deal-breaker, but a little bothersome). The startup time and image processing time seem to be slightly slower than in Photoshop, also. Many issues are minor, but they make the product feel a little less polished than Photoshop or Elements.

At least one reviewer has complained about long install and startup times. I noticed the long install time. And my initial startup after installing was 30 seconds or more. After the first time (and a computer reboot), my startup time for Photo X2 was about 8 seconds, which isn't bad. After, loading and closing it and then reopening it in the same Windows session, the loading time was on the order of 2-3 seconds. I don't find these times to be a problem at all, but if you're worried about the performance on your system you might want to download the 30-day fully functional trial from Corel's web site (though it is a 300 MB download or something). It might also be useful to download it to take a look at the features and get a feel for the program if you've never used it before.

In the end, Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 is good software that is feature rich and a good choice for medium to advanced-level users who have outgrown Photoshop Elements and can't justify spending 6 to 10 times the price to buy Adobe Photoshop.

96 of 105 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Sad goodbye to a once-valued brand name - now bloated and ugly, December 26, 2007

By	Suzanne Saunders (Rocky Mountains USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I've used Paint Shop Pro for longer than I can remember, back when it was a product of JASC. I think I first acquired Paint Shop Pro 5 or 6.

In my experience, the program has just kept getting worse with each edition since Corel took it over. Bloated, unstable, and slow, the degraded performance seems to be a tradeoff for some of the fancy features Corel has introduced - many of which I don't ever use.

Frustrated with PSP Pro XI's clunky performance which seemed to get a little worse after I bought a Vista-equipped PC, I recently took the plunge and bought the "upgrade" to X2. Now I'm just about done with the whole PSP ride and looking around for an alternative photo editing program. (And please don't tell me to get more RAM; I've added RAM up to the limits of this six-month-old PC: 4GB.)

First, it took a long time for X2 to install. Turns out the culprit is a little third party "licensing" program (psiservice.exe) that both X1 and X2 install on each customer's computer, that Corel doesn't inform us about, and that some people consider spyware. I found out about it on Wikipedia. Once I followed the Corel instructions on dealing with psiservice.exe, I got X2 installed. By the way, Corel did not explain what "psiservice.exe" is, or that it's a program installed by Corel's PSP, or give any option to uninstall psiservice.exe.

X2 has turned out to be a laggard performer. It doesn't work any faster than X1, either when I start it up or when I'm opening a photo image to work on. Also, X2 has consistently hung up after about the third image I've worked on, so I've had to close and restart it.

I've wasted my money. I bought it directly from Corel, and I assume there's no money back guarantee. I plan to try to get a refund, won't be surprised if I can't.

This is a sad goodbye to a software brand name - Paint Shop Pro - that for at least a decade provided decent photo editing capability, at a reasonable price.

I just hope that when I find a replacement for it, I can figure out how to uninstall its little third-party "licensing" program.

36 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Upgrade from Elements 5.0, December 18, 2007

By	E. Meiners "pawnslinger" (Mesa, AZ USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am a longtime user of Photoshop. Recently I was looking for an upgrade path from Elements 5.0. I considered 2 programs, Elements 6.0 and PaintShop Pro X2. I chose PaintShop Pro because of the reviews found here on Amazon... and the reported bugs in Elements 6.0 ... many people think it was rushed too early to meet the Christmas demand. When I received my copy of PaintShop Pro, the installation/registration/latest upgrade download process took me 2 days and more technical computer know-how than I care to describe. I had to get my son (the tech guru in the house) to unsnarl the mess. Once this initial hurdle was overcome and I've had a chance to use the program... I am extremely pleased! I went back to some old PSD files and they cracked open effortlessly. I quickly applied some easy fixes that I could never figure out in PhotoShop. And asked the family which they preferred? PaintShop Pro versions won handily. I am sure that PhotoShop could've done as well, but I wasn't expert enough in its use. I am extremely pleased with PaintShop Pro and would recommend it to anyone that isn't a PhotoShop guru -- but there are some installation rough spots... having a Windows Vista expert handy can be very helpful in getting started.