It's that time of the year again. The season of disappointment is upon us. September's the month when Corel always unveils a new version of PSP, which is amazing, since there hasn't been a truly new PSP in six years. PSP 13.2 is out and I decided to go ahead and review it, if not to analyze its new features (there aren't any), at least to remind everyone not to fall for Corel's schtick again and be duped into buying this product. Like I've said many times, the best PSP is version 10, so stick with it, if you don't have it and can't find it, look for it in the appropriate channels. Anyway, as you might have guessed, the differences between PSP 13 and 13.2 aren't many. The installation now takes about 10 minutes and there have been some optimizations: 107 mb ram at startup, 330 mb virtual memory (including the junk services) , 638 mb program folder, 24 278 files in 906 folders (the last one's actually more than PSP 13). There are two startup services that run even if you're not using PSP - Corel Photo Downloader and Corel File Shell Monitor.
So that's about it. The review could just end here, but I wanted to talk a little bit about the incredible laziness over there at Corel. This goes mainly for the developers, because the marketing team, which has been kind enough to contact this blog, has worked hard to make this stagnant puddle of duckweed seem fresh and new. It's the developers that after a year of doing who knows what, have produced a box of nothing that costs 90 euro, or 70 euro for an upgrade. Just for fun, I decided to replicate my PSP10 interface in PSP13 and imposed them on top of one another. This will give you an idea of how little Corel has done in the past 6 years:
Remember when JASC used to make complicated operations very intuitive and easy to use, while Photoshop was far behind in practicality? Well, now Adobe works hard to make things easy, while Corel works easy to make things hard and unpractical. A good example is the new Content Aware resizer/carver algorithm, which I talked about in the previous articles. Both PSP and Photoshop borrow the same algorithm from the developers at MERL (Mitsubishi),
but they went about it it in completely different ways. Adobe chose to implement the resizer as a simple deform tool – you scale the image as you would any object and the content aware resizer does its job. In PSP, Corel chose to add a bulky add-on instead. And while Adobe's content aware object carver is a simple brush (paint over the unwanted object and the algorithm will carve it out and add new seams from the image), Corel settled with a destructive filter that sucks in the image (vertically or horizontally) without adding new seams. See the result below:
So even with a ready-made, freely distributable algorithm, Corel have managed to screw things up. This and the many other useless add-ons Corel have pasted onto the core program (ExpressLab, Organizer, Project creator, Photo downloader, etc.) leads me to believe that Corel are either too afraid or too lazy to touch JASC's core program code. So sticking more and more add-ons onto the main program is a way to simulate progress.
In contrast, JASC's genius and dedication were so great that now 6 years in their absence, PSP is still ahead of Photoshop in some areas. Photoshop still lacks something as practical as a warp brush. Its customizability is still pitiful compared to PSP's approach - “move any button anywhere”, “set any shortcut to anything”. PSP's colors/materials/textures palette is far more intuitive than the one in PS. In other areas: brushes, retouching tools and oddly enough, program simplicity, six years was enough time for Photoshop to pull so far ahead, that PSP's not even a competitor any more. I used to taunt my Photoshop-using friends that I can do anything they can, only much faster, and with greater quality and ease. I also participated in Photoshop contests with good old PSP9 and even made a couple hundred dollars from it. Now, I'm sad to say, I have to resort to Photoshop for some things PSP can't do. As one reader of this blog put it so well, we might have to morph over to the evil Adobe empire sooner or later.
