Paint Shop Pro will never replace Adobe Photoshop in the world of professional image editing. For one thing it doesn't run on the Macs that most art editors are wedded to, and for another thing it's too cheap. We think cheap is good, but buyers who aren't spending their own money tend to think that dearer is better, or at least safer. IBM founded an empire on this sort of thinking.

Fortunately for Corel, the 11th version of Paint Shop Pro, which has been saddled with the less than snappy moniker of Paint Shop Pro Photo XI, doesn't need to capture the Photoshop market to succeed.

Go anywhere within spitting distance of a tourist attraction these days and you'll see happy snappers squinting at tiny digital cameras held unsteadily at arm's length. The best thing these people could do to improve their photographs is to start using the viewfinder to compose their pictures, but the second best bet would be to buy a copy of Paint Shop Pro Photo XI.

With an army of potential users who need to manage, massage and manipulate digital images, Corel has a vast target audience. To capture this market, all Corel has to do is make its program easier for beginners to use and add new features that appeal to everybody, instead of boosting the already extensive advanced feature set that only photo experts ever need.

The big draw in the latest incarnation of Paint Shop Pro is a photo management system called Organizer. This replaces the simplistic picture browser of the previous version (though the memory of the old browser lives on in the keyboard shortcut for Organizer, which is Ctrl+B).

Organizer is a resizable area running across the bottom of the screen. It may also be unpinned and used as a separate window if desired. On its left is an Explorer-like view of the My Pictures folder plus any other folders you care to add. Images can be assigned ratings, captions and descriptive tags; the tags making it possible to view images in thematic groups without physically moving them from the folders where they're stored.

The images can be sorted and searched using various criteria, and the size of the thumbnails is steplessly adjustable by a zoom control. A Quick Review feature displays the currently selected images as a slideshow, which can be saved in Corel's own Snapfire format and e-mailed to friends and family, though they'll need to download a free copy of Snapfire from Corel's Web site to view them. Images can be dragged from Organizer into separate, named photo trays if you want to sort them manually.

The new Organizer can't quite match the capabilities of a good image manager, such as Google's Picasa, but it has the major advantage that all you have to do is double-click a thumbnail to bring the might of Paint Shop Pro's editing facilities to bear, whereas Picasa and its rivals are capable of only simple manipulations.

All of the old tools, adjustments and enhancements remain, including noise removal, artistic effects, distortion correction and a one-step photo fix, but there are some interesting new tools in this release.

The best of these is the Time Machine, which digitally distresses an image to make it look like one of seven different old-fashioned chemical processes including Daguerrotypes, albumen prints and cyanotypes. Another welcome addition is a depth of field simulator, in which selected foreground areas can be kept sharp while the background is systematically blurred, a feat which is not easy to achieve with digital snapshot cameras.

Furthermore, the Films and Filters option is great fun, even if the results are difficult to predict. It creates effects that simulate the use of coloured filters with different types of chemically-processed film.

Somewhat less successful is an automated skin smoother for portrait shots. If you're looking for spectacular results like the digital makeover that knocks 20 years off the ages of Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in the latest X-Men film, you'll be disappointed. Paint Shop Pro can do this sort of thing, but it takes hours of painstaking work using a number of separate tools.

Rather more successful is an automated colour changer, which works well with the right sort of picture. You can easily change the colour of a car from blue to red, but turning a red car blue is problematic unless you want it to have blue rear lights too.

Paint Shop Pro users can have a great time experimenting with new techniques, and anything that brings an element of fun into everyday life is to be welcomed. You may even find that your best pictures are created not inside your camera, but on your computer.

Verdict
Definitely worth buying if you need a versatile image editor that's powerful yet easy to learn, but it's not worth upgrading from the previous version unless you can make use of the new image management features.

Company: Corel

Contact: 0800 376 9271

Tags: corel adobe photoshop ibm ian mckellen patrick stewart corel paint shop pro paint shop pro graphics