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!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #378 in Software
• Brand: Corel
• Model: PSPPX2ENPC
• Released on: 2007-09-20
• Platform: Windows
• Format: CD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 2.25" h x 8.00" w x 9.75" l, .75 pounds

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

Customer Reviews

Probably the Best Software for Advanced Editing in its Price Range
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.

Sad goodbye to a once-valued brand name - now bloated and ugly
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.

Upgrade from Elements 5.0
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.