I've read a number of reviews regarding
PaintShop Pro XI and since I've used PaintShop Pro X for several months and then
PaintShop Pro XI for a month I thought I'd kick in my two ¢ents worth.
In that time I've done quite a lot of editing of photos and I can tell you this program is worth it's weight in gold. I can't afford the golden standard,
PhotoShop, which if you follow the link you can see sells for a hefty $649.
That put Photoshop out of my reach, I suppose it within the reach of people who can afford $5,000 DSLR camera systems with all the accessories.
That said,
PaintShop Pro does most of what I need for less than $100.
PaintShop Pro allows me to fix a lot of common problems with photographs. For example, taking a photo of items that should be vertical or horizontal, waterlines, buildings, it's difficult when shooting hand held to get the photo straight, sometimes even with a tripod it's difficult. But paintshop has a straightening tool that makes correcting that very easy.
When shooting with the a wide angle lens there is a certain amount of fisheye distortion,
PaintShop Pro has a tool that does a pretty good job of that.
Sometimes perspective results in what should be parallel not being parallel. Sometimes this is desirable for things to look natural from a viewers perspective, railroad tracks being an example, other times it is not, shooting the edge of a forest, or buildings in a downtown area. In those situations a perspective tool makes it easy to correct.
Now, I have a problem using things as they were intended to be used and I discovered that there are also some fun abuses one can do with the perspective tool to create impossible situations in photographs. Here is an example:
We always try to get exposures right but various real world conditions and human errors sometimes messes that up. Paintshop Pro has a wide variety of ways to alter brightness, contrast, areas that are too dark or too light.
One of the most interesting tools that alters contrast and brightness is the Clarify tool. Clarify increases contrast in areas of uniform brightness, increases brightness in dark areas, and overall gives a photograph a more vivid interesting appearance. Like all good things this tool too can be abused for unrealistic effects.
This is a hallway in my house. This is what happens when you take an image and run it through Clarify at maximum strength four times. Massively exaggerated detail contrast, and strange coloring. It's kind of like Disney and Goth got blended and then took acid.
This also demonstrates the fisheye tool though I didn't tweak it exactly, the vertical items are a lot more vertical than they would have been without using it at all. It has an adjustment from 1-100 that determines how much it adjusts the image and it's something that you have to gauge visually and try. The preview window in this case is really too small to be useful so to really get it right you have to apply and if it's not good, control-Z which undoes the last thing you did, change the value and re-apply.
Another thing that it has that is really cool is a scratch remover and an object remover.
The original photograph had a telephone pole and wires all over the place. I decided I wanted to see what it would look like with underground wiring.
The scratch removal tool can remove any thin straight item, scratches, wires, doesn't matter. I used it to remove the wires. I tried to use the object removal tool to remove the telephone pole but filling in that large of area from surrounding material didn't really work, so I used the clone brush, which allows you to clone a part of the image, to clone in a fake tree. I didn't want it to look like an exact clone of another tree however so I cloned in branches and parts of branches to make it unique.
The object removal tool, the scratch remover, and the clone tool, together can allow you to remove many undesirable elements from an image.
Another tool that is often useful is a high pass sharpening tool. If you get a photo where the detail is a little bit soft, you can crispin it up with this tool and if the noise is low in the original you can create some significant resolution gains.
I have found that what can work well is to apply it multiple times with different pixel settings. For example, perhaps first with eight pixels, then four, then two. Each step brings out finer detail. Doing this only works if the original photo was low noise, but it can really improve detail.
There is a noise removal tool that it calls one step noise removal in the enhance menu that can be really helpful. Under many situations it can remove a large amount of image noise without removing image detail. It is particularly good at not removing noise without hurting detail from things with linear features. It tends to be less kind to detail if the detail has a lot of randomness to it, and on the beach, trees with a gazillion small leaves, etc.
The down side to the one-step noise removal tool is that it can creates something that that resembles jpeg artifacts. There is a jpeg artifact removal tool but it works marginally at best. The contrast of the artifacts it creates is not high, but if you run the resulting image through clarify, they become very visible.
Most negative reviews I have seen of this product come from people who have use Jasp Photoshop before Jasp was acquired by Corel. Those people don't like the fact that a photo organizer product that was previsiouly included is gone.
For me it doesn't matter, I have tools for that which I prefer for photo organization. People also complain about the photo browser. I agree it's somewhat hostile.
Another issue I have with my Camera, a Canon PowerShot S2 IS, is that the camera has some issues with chromatic aberration, particularly when zoomed, PaintShop has an abberation removal tool that works quite well. It also has a purple fringe removal tool that works nicely when purple fringe happens.
These tend to be the features I use most often at present. I will elaborate more perhaps when I've used it long enough to sample some of the other features.
