Putting money aside, there are a few areas of concern I found with Paint Shop Pro. Compared to competing packages, it seemed somewhat bloated. I would prefer if the user interface was a little more organized. It seems to me that it offers so many options and customizations that it makes the software somewhat of a memory hog for options that are not all that useful. On this same note, some of the tool and filters ran much slower than similar features in Photoshop and Corel Painter. Paint Shop Pro is very promising and hopefully the developers will work on optimizing it and removing those tools and features that aren't all that useful.

As far as the program goes it has most of the features mainstream software, such as layers, brushes, and masking. I will go into a little detail on parts of the program that stand out to me.

Raw Importing

Both Paint Shop Pro 9.0 and Photoshop CS now include built in support for opening raw files used by digital cameras, but Paint Shop Pro's utility lacks many of the options available in Photoshop CS. One of the most noticeable being the ability to set custom white balance temperatures. In Paint Shop Pro you are limited to seven preset white balance options. This is not a big issue if your digital camera supports white balancing, but it can still be annoying nonetheless. Similarly, five presets are used for the amount of sharpening, while Photoshop CS provides values from 0 to 100.

The raw format converter in Paint Shop Pro is also much slower in rendering the preview of any values you change, which can be quite annoying when you are trying to fine tune your raw images. This limitation can become quite cumbersome if you need to adjust multiple raw files (my camera can hold 117 raw images at 6.3 megapixels). As far as raw support is concerned, Paint Shop Pro leaves much to be desired, however there are many freeware raw conversion utilities available for download if required.

One Step Photo Fix

One Step Photo Fix provides users with a simple way of correcting photographs in Paint Shop Pro. You simply select it from the drop down menu under adjustments, and Paint Shop Pro runs a series of adjustments that "optimize" lighting, sharpness, color, etc. of a photograph. It is a useful function for those who can't take the time to learn how to adjust all these things manually, however the tradeoff is that it can produce some unwanted effects depending on the picture. One Step Photo Pix also seems to lose some detail in that it appears to slightly blur the image while trying to keep the edges sharp.

The only Photoshop equivalent to One Step Photo Fix would be Auto Level Adjustments. Honestly, I would recommend not using either. It is well worth the time to learn how to properly adjust all these setting in either program. Having said that, if I did not already know how to do color balancing and levels and curves, I am very impressed with how Paint Shop Pro handles most of files I intentionally took wrong.

Color correction

Paint Shop Pro offers many ways to adjust the colors and how they are balanced in a photograph. I was very pleased at how intuitive the color correction seems to be. Level adjustments are fewer in Paint Shop Pro than Photoshop, but this shouldn't present a problem. With so many helpful ways to adjust these settings elsewhere in the program, it would have been redundant to include more levels. I found it both faster and easier to match the colors in the photograph to what I saw in real life in Paint Shop Pro. This impresses me because I have been using Photoshop for five years.

Fill Flash

To correct for underexposed areas in pictures, Paint Shop Pro has something called Flash Fill. Basically it lightens up darker areas of a picture attempting to bring out more detail, much like how Shadow/Highlights works in Photoshop CS. Flash Fill works well enough, but it does not offer as many options and tweaks as Photoshop CS. Considering you can emulate this adjustment with levels elsewhere in Paint Shop pro (levels and curves), I find the Fill Flash feature next to useless.

Other corrections such as hue, saturation and brightness all work as expected with no surprises or let downs. The same goes for distort/transform adjustments. It seems intuitive and easy enough to rotate, skew, distort images as needed.

Creative Painting

Paint Shop Pro seems to work well as far as digital photo studio. It also has good digital painting side to it, unlike Photoshop, and seems to be geared more towards the digital painting market. Some features are very useful, such as the ability to use a textured canvas and different media types. For example, you could paint with water color and the colors would bleed and blend much like you would expect real water colors to in real life.

Their brush tool reminds me very much of Corel Painter and looks very promising. It does not offer as many media types such as Painter, but it has more than enough to produce anything in an artist's imagination. At times the brushes seemed a little slow on my relatively powerful system, but it wasn't so horrible that I couldn't work.

One tool which impressed me very much was the mixer palette. This tools acts like a painter's palettes. With it you can mix different colors to create new colors, and then use the different painting media to create realistic brush strokes onto the image.

As far as digital painting goes, all the tools offered were really good. The only part that seemed weak in comparison to Painter and some of the other digital painting programs was the blending options. Hopefully this is something that will be improved upon in future releases. Having said all this, if money is not an issue, then please send some to me after buying Photoshop and Corel Painter. However, from a cost versus features standpoint, Paint Shop Pro gives you more for your hard-earned money than the other programs.

Conclusion

My first impression for Paint Shop Pro was that it was another Photoshop clone. After starting it for the first time and fanning through the manual I realized that it was almost an entire creative suite . It covered both my great interests with digital imaging, photo correction, image manipulation, and digital painting. Paint Shop Pro handles all these tasks very well and is definitely more affordanle than many of the programs that only focus on one of these aspects. With pricing starting around $100 (retail), Paint Shop Pro 9 is definitely the recommended program for anyone on a software budget.