Well, it's time to wrap things up here. Yes, Paint Shop Pro 13 came out and after a short and unpleasant encounter with this loud, obnoxious lummox, I can safely say PSP is now beyond repair, beyond hope and is doomed to fade into obscurity. A blog named “How to improve PSP” is therefore no longer relevant. Sooooo, I thought it'd be appropriate for this blog to blow up and go out with a loud, farty bang, accompanied by the pungent stench of failure, just like Paint Shop Pro.
So let's begin.
The name
The first thing I noticed - Corel have made yet another experiment with the name – it's now "Paint Shop Photo Pro", not "Paint Shop Pro Photo" or “Paint Shop Pro”.
- “Hey, Max, what are you using there?”
- “Why, It's PSP – Paint Shop Pro, I mean Paint Shop Pro Photo, er... Express? No, it's Paint Shop Photo Pro... Ultimate? I'm using Photoshop damn it.”
Maybe putting in the word "photo", and then moving it ever closer to the beginning, was meant to snatch some of that "Photoshop" popularity. But let's imagine someone saying: “No! This... generic movie/pop star cannot be this fit! There must be some sort of sham! I think this picture has been Paint Shopped Photo Pro-ed! I heard they have something called... the thinnify”...
The sales pitch
The new slogan is "Professional-looking photos - fast!". Really. Let's just go with “Kind of professional-ish photo fixer-upper for your friend..... the monkey.....'s baby sister....'s pet raccoon”. The “Art gallery” on their site is just a photo album with some filters used, which reaffirms my suspicion that there are no actual artists working in Corel, or even consulting them. Let's make “House M.D. and only consult Web M.D.”
Use of resources
The RAM usage is 188 mb at startup, which is three times what PSP10 takes up, which is odd, considering it's the same core program. The size of a fresh installation is now a whopping 1.24 gb. 23 608 files in 1264 folders. The PSPX that I've used for several years is 2916 files and 119 folders, occupying only 184 of my megabytes. If you go to the "What's new" section on their website, you'll actually see this: "Enhanced! Speed and performance."
PSP now installs more junk services than ever, without even asking you of course. Virtual memory including background processes like MediaCataloger.exe, metadatamgr.exe, psiservice.exe, CorelPhotoDownloader.exe and standby.exe is 618 mb. And of course, PSIservice, Standby and Metadatamgr don't go away when you close PSP. They need to look after you, and check the sodium content of your food I guess. There's also a file called "BWOut.vfx" that my Avira detects as Proxy.Puma.PF trojan. I have a suggestion – instead of a pretty ballerina, the splash screen should have a fat, sweaty guy, sitting in your bed and refusing to leave.
The name
The first thing I noticed - Corel have made yet another experiment with the name – it's now "Paint Shop Photo Pro", not "Paint Shop Pro Photo" or “Paint Shop Pro”.
- “Hey, Max, what are you using there?”
- “Why, It's PSP – Paint Shop Pro, I mean Paint Shop Pro Photo, er... Express? No, it's Paint Shop Photo Pro... Ultimate? I'm using Photoshop damn it.”
Maybe putting in the word "photo", and then moving it ever closer to the beginning, was meant to snatch some of that "Photoshop" popularity. But let's imagine someone saying: “No! This... generic movie/pop star cannot be this fit! There must be some sort of sham! I think this picture has been Paint Shopped Photo Pro-ed! I heard they have something called... the thinnify”...
The sales pitch
The new slogan is "Professional-looking photos - fast!". Really. Let's just go with “Kind of professional-ish photo fixer-upper for your friend..... the monkey.....'s baby sister....'s pet raccoon”. The “Art gallery” on their site is just a photo album with some filters used, which reaffirms my suspicion that there are no actual artists working in Corel, or even consulting them. Let's make “House M.D. and only consult Web M.D.”
Use of resources
The RAM usage is 188 mb at startup, which is three times what PSP10 takes up, which is odd, considering it's the same core program. The size of a fresh installation is now a whopping 1.24 gb. 23 608 files in 1264 folders. The PSPX that I've used for several years is 2916 files and 119 folders, occupying only 184 of my megabytes. If you go to the "What's new" section on their website, you'll actually see this: "Enhanced! Speed and performance."
PSP now installs more junk services than ever, without even asking you of course. Virtual memory including background processes like MediaCataloger.exe, metadatamgr.exe, psiservice.exe, CorelPhotoDownloader.exe and standby.exe is 618 mb. And of course, PSIservice, Standby and Metadatamgr don't go away when you close PSP. They need to look after you, and check the sodium content of your food I guess. There's also a file called "BWOut.vfx" that my Avira detects as Proxy.Puma.PF trojan. I have a suggestion – instead of a pretty ballerina, the splash screen should have a fat, sweaty guy, sitting in your bed and refusing to leave.
even if you close your eyes, he's still there...
The installation... oh boy...
PSP 13 has the worst installation of any program I've seen. It has three stages: “Recomposing installation”, “Preparing your system” and “Installing”. Now, I have a decent dual-core processor with 4 GB RAM and the damn thing took 40 minutes to "almost" install. That's almost twice as much time as it took to install my Windows OS. Exactly 40 minutes into the installation, an error message pops up and says “Windows Image Acquisition failed to start”. Great, another 10 minutes to “roll back” the installation. I wanted to just end it there so badly, but I somehow brought myself to trying again. After a few more attempts to install, I figured out that I had to tinker with services.msc for the installation to work. I wonder how many potential users will be repulsed by the trial installation alone, let's hope a lot.
By the way, you can't start the program until you register with Big Bro Corel. Of course, I happened to have a Corel account, I registered it way back when I wasn't embarrassed to death of making one. Get this. My password was "paint shop pro rocks" :S Isn't that just as cute as it is ironic, as it is truly sad and pathetic? Picture the weird and mysterious world of the late 1990's, imagine a bright-eyed and excited 14-year-old Maxy coming up with that password: "paint shop pro rocks", and then 24-year-old disgruntled jerk Max zapps in from the future and says in a monotone voice: "Only disappointment and frustration awaits you". OK...
The program itself
...froze within the first 10 seconds of startup. Yes, I still had some residual excitement from my childhood experiences of checking out a new PSP, even though I knew it was going to be another disappointment. Still, I was at least a bit interested in what X3 was going to be like... And then I saw it...
Well, they changed the color scheme again. Made it even darker. You know what else they changed? Nothing. Not even the icons. The UI is the same, they just added buttons for all the useless “add-ons” they stacked on top of the core, I like to call them “growths”. “Express lab”, “Organizer”, and now another rudimentary appendage – Project creator. Do you know what it does? It can do... photo book, card, collage, facebook, backup disk, order online, all of those things. Can you guess I didn't bother to look into it?
The core program, now called “Full editor” is essentially the same as PSP9 and 10. So absolutely no improvement in the brush engine, whatever I wrote in my previous article, applies to PSPX3 as well - the awful rendering and pressure support, the airbrush graininess, everything.
The only positive thing in PSPX3 is the "smart carver" (actually, the Content-Aware Image Resizer), which "sucks in" and masks the picture around an object to make it disappear. This is useful for objects which clearly distinguish themselves from the background and (don't let Corel hear you) quite frankly, is a brilliant new tool in photo manipulation. Is it worth marrying the bloated ogre for the pretty jewel on its finger? I don't think so.
You can only fool yourself for so many years, it's time to admit this thing isn't going anywhere. It's an ever growing mess that will never be fixed by Corel. They will never make a straight-forward PSP without any parasite services and useless features, because the mindless dullards simply don't realize what is good and what isn't. It's time to move on. The only thing I can hope for is for Corel's PSP experiment to die and get picked up as open-source, like Blender. I don't think this will ever happen, though.
So to end on a positive note:
