Corel PaintShop Pro X4 review

Tom Arah Read more September 21, 2011

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£66

Price when reviewed

When PaintShop Pro first launched, almost 20 years ago, the world of bitmap editing was based around the occasional screenshot, onscreen painting and scanned photograph. Nowadays, PaintShop Pro X4 is focused almost exclusively on helping digital camera users get the most out of their ever-expanding photo collections.

This fundamental change has demanded a complete rethink of working practice, and PaintShop Pro X4 finally gets it spot on with a simple and intuitive digital workflow based on three tabbed workspaces: Manage for image organisation; Adjust for image enhancement; and Edit for full-blown image manipulation.

It isn’t only the workflow that is streamlined: PaintShop Pro’s interface used to betray its origins as 1990’s shareware; now it looks sleek, professional and cutting-edge.

The first task for any digital camera user is to get on top of their images. This is handled in PaintShop Pro X4’s Manage workspace, where photos can be viewed in thumbnail or preview mode. It doesn’t offer the advanced keyword, face and location tagging that Photoshop Elements and Picasa major on, but the manual and automatic collections and folder-based management are effective.

Another improvement surrounds the program’s handling of RAW files, a format that’s becoming increasingly popular as DSLRs go mainstream. To this end, the dedicated Camera RAW Lab has been updated, complete with histogram-based feedback and effective new options for automatically recovering highlights. Once you’re happy with the results, you can quickly and non-destructively apply the same changes to multiple RAW files.

The Manage workspace is also the natural home for other commands dealing with multiple images, such as emailing and creating print layouts. Again, PaintShop Pro X4’s options are weak compared to Picasa’s and Elements’, especially as the previously bundled Photo Project Creator for creating cards, albums, video slideshows and so on has been dropped (as has Painter Essentials). However, PaintShop Pro X4 does now let you share your photos online by posting them directly to Flickr or Facebook.

PaintShop Pro X4 also offers two important new ways of combining multiple images. The first, the greatly improved HDR Merge capability, lets you take bracketed exposures to bring out the maximum colour and detail in shadows, midtones and highlights.

The second, Photo Blend, lets you mark out the areas that you want to use or lose from multiple shots of the same image, handy for removing passing objects or taking the best face from all members in a group portrait. Both features are welcome additions, but inferior to the similar capabilities in Photoshop Elements.

Corel has also streamlined the Manage workspace’s Fullscreen Review mode to concentrate on rotating, rating and viewing. To be able to enhance your images as you go, you need to switch to PaintShop Pro X4’s new Adjust workspace (previously known as Express Lab). Here, you can load each of your photos in turn to apply the most common global adjustments such as Smart Photo Fix, Brightness/Contrast and Colour Balance.

With various performance improvements, including GPU optimisations, even complex effects such as Noise Removal and Local Tone Mapping update in real time. As does the new Fill Light/Clarity filter, which lets you bring out subtle details, especially in shadow areas – a great addition.

With easy access to tools for cropping, straightening, red eye removal, makeover effects and cloning, along with the option to automatically save edits and preserve copies, the streamlined Adjust workspace is undoubtedly the highlight of this release, and will provide all the editing power you need in the vast majority of cases.

For occasions when you need more, the Edit workspace gives you full access to everything else PaintShop Pro X4 has to offer: selection-based handling, artistic brushes, picture tubes, text handling, advanced layer-based composition and so on. This is also where the software provides a wide range of useful, and not so useful, filter effects, including two significant additions.

The first, Vignette, lets you apply a soft outer border around the area you want to highlight. The second, Selective Focus, lets you blur out unwanted details, as well as create tilt-shift effects where real world scenes are made to look like surreal toy-like models.

With Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 essentially treading water (see opposite), PaintShop Pro X4 is certainly gaining ground and may well prove the better, not only cheaper, option for many users. This is particularly the case when it’s used for fast photo enhancement and in-depth editing, with the free Google Picasa taking care of high-end organisational duties and web sharing.

Ultimately, however, we can’t quite bring ourselves to recommend PaintShop Pro X4. While its streamlined interface and workflow certainly look the part, in practice there are still too many shortcomings and rough edges – on our 64-bit test system we experienced a handful of bugs and crashes while reviewing the product. So Photoshop Elements’ more complete and polished solution retains its edge – but only just.