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.
11 comments:
As mentined in pre posts, are there some fine sites/forums which deal with Paint Shop Pro X2/X3. Tips, tutorials, how to speed-up X2/X3? Which services/programs can be safely disabled/removed after instalation?
I hope there *will be* a new Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3 in January 2011.
...oh, sorry I mean - Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X4 in January 2011 of course.
(in)PSP X4(I hope, Jan/2010) - inteligent search for edge in Straighten Tool can take an advanced extension, but for now I am realy missing it in X3.
I have worked on few hundreds scanneed papers and used - Straighten Tool for slightly correction of pages, it must be done at edge of text block or an enge of image on page. You must first zoom page with mouse and so on... It is very borring after few hours! So it will be an evolution of - Straighten Tool, if it can automaticaly search for edge. COREL come on!!
I got sent an advert for X3 in my email today that offered a free 8Gb memory stick in order to sell it (and slashed the price by almost half). You know a product's in trouble when it offers free anything just to sell it.
Now maybe X14 has even better features, but I doubt that.
Actually I am grown up with Jasc PSP from the very first version psp 1.0. The great improvement that Jasc was making by every new version, suddenly ended at version 9. Anno 2011 I keep calling it the 'Legendary PSP 9'. From version X the thing started to mess up. I don't know why I purchased ever the X2, but so far probably I have used it about 5 hrs. I am still using the PSP 9 and it's still the most efficient applications for photo editing. I use it in combination with Lightroom 3.4, unfortunately it does not supports .psp extension files. I hope that the upcoming PSP X4 will reset some so eagerly desired simplicity. The new specs. so far shows only new functions, but the 'touch and feel' should be now the main priority.
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Specs PSP X4 (Release date sep2011 ?):
Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X4 (14) GB
Corel ® Paint Shop ™ Pro X4 provides passionate photographers even better value for money with hundreds of photo editing, a streamlined workspace, new professional effects and share with one click. Faster retouching. With the HDR-Module (High Dynamic Range) creates a perfectly exposed picture or you get a surreal, artistic effect. With Photo Merge removes distracting elements and combine the best elements of a series of images. And very nice the new Selective Focus: You can change the scene into a miniature world without using an expensive tilt-shift lens and need. Managing and editing your photos is easier with the redesigned workspaces and dual display support. When you're ready to give you your best photos to show you can one-click sharing on sites like Facebook ® and Flickr ®.
Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X4 (14) Ultimate
Corel ® Paint Shop Pro X4 ™ Ultimate gives you the freedom to make your best images ever. Besides all the powerful photo editing, Paint Shop Pro ™ X4, you also the award-winning photographic filters, Nik ® Color Efex Pro ™ 3.0, a choice of 21 beautiful images from Fotolia and a collection of our finest and most popular Picture Tubes. Retouch photos with ease for most common imperfections quickly correct or go much further with creative options and vector illustration tools, artistic brushes, and layers. The new HDR-module features for photos and the updated RAW lab has everything in hand to manage, create and share great pictures. And when you're ready to show off your work, you can use your creations in a simple click on sharing sites like Facebook ® and Flickr ®!
I am still using PSP 5 for my daily cropping screenshot tasks. It starts up in a snap and does not eat away RAM.
Reading your blog really shows how bad programmers really can be. PS was always a resource hog, I assume that came from the MAC where running multiple applications was never much a usecase.
Just came across PSP X4 and wanted to hear from you before I went ahead and got it. I haven't moved past v12.5 since I started reading your reviews. Getting v14 depends entirely on what you have to say about it.
Hello, ApoCaLypSe,
I did try the new X4 and it's still based on the old PSP9 core (big surprise), few new features, and the dark UI is now permanent. The only thing that impressed me was the smaller installation size (314 mb). The brush engine and the CAIR have not been improved one bit. The performance is a bit choppy, still much worse than PSPX, but about 20-30% better than X3. Some operations are very choppy, at least on my PC - for example the redraw speed of the text tool and brush outlines is abysmal. So I wouldn't recommend PSP X4. I'm sticking with PSPX (for editing), and I found a great new program - Sai, which handles tablets perfectly and is great for painting.
Hi Maxim,
don't know whether this comment section would be the exactly right place for my question, that is, if my question sounds a bit abrupt I'm sorry about it. However, it is about Paint Shop Pro so I guess I could at least try, eh? :)
First of all, thanks for the great blog. I've been using PSP 8.10 (got it cheap on Ebay) for quite long now and it was very enlightening to hear the best one's the first X; no need to waste money or time in any later releases. Anyway, I draw my drawings by hand, scan them and with PSP 8.10 I do some scratch and dust removal, maybe a texture or two once in a while and some gradient here and there (usually with another layer). And for a little while, a year or two, I've been working on a rather personal comic book project of mine (I'm on page 20 as of writing). When the analog part of the project is complete all the A3 pages will be scanned and then then I'll edit them as I described above. Ok, here comes the question...
Does there exist a 64-bit Paint Shop Pro? Now, if I scan an A4 at 1200dpi I really really like the higher resolution but with 32-bit XP and maximum of 2GB on the motherboard I can barely edit the picture (sometimes not even that) and saving and even resizing is impossible, memory runs out. If I remember correctly, A4 1200dpi was nearly 400 megabytes. Updating to a newer computer with 64-bit operating system (XP 64, Vista 64 or 7 64) with hell of lot more ram ain't gonna be my biggest problem but the memory management of PSP. Can you give an advice on this? I really would like to stay with PSP and not switch to PS.
Thank you for your time :)
I'm pleased to meet dedicated PSP users. I was actually searching for "bloated Photoshop" when this site came up.
I've use the software since version 6, because I felt that I couldn't fully utilize the potential of Photoshop and, comparing the same release years, PSP was smaller. The software still does for me what it did back then, and I occasionally fire it up for basic processing, such as stretching the histogram. I just can't use "brightness" and "contrast" of simpler programs. They're so unintuitive.
I always keep multiple tools and versions of each at hand, instead of completely migrating to a particular one. They're like screwdrivers of different sizes, and a pocket knife. Each one is best for a particular task, because I happen to have found a good approach.
If we can ignore the price of software, there is no such thing as a tool being "too professional" for anybody. I've come to the conclusion that an instrument built for work can, with rational layout of the available options, guide the user along a productive path.
I converted to Photoshop 7, which I believe to be the last non-bloated version of the software – exactly like the contributor above – to produce high resolution scans. At the time good computers had 1 GB of RAM, and I had 2 GB. That was not enough to process vinyl artwork with color correction and screen removal.
All Windows graphics editors then kept the whole image in memory, some – like PSP – paging out to disk only the undo history, and lacked computational shortcuts for quick preview and scrolling of extremely large images. For example, the histogram would be recomputed on every brush stroke, filter preview would most of the time act upon the entire image area.
Photoshop was built for real work and could handle the task I had set to complete with ease and faster (except the basic scanning to disk, for which I found IrfanView to be more reliable). Just like "disk based" sound editors, Photoshop had its own very efficient virtual memory or "Scratch disk", and by making use of it, allowed to edit images exceeding the available physical memory.
I find that the best version of PSP was V.9, because I haven't encountered the bugs you mentioned. And v.10 had another, more complex installation method possibly to discourage piracy. PSP 9 does basically work if extracted to a directory and does not need a more elaborate installation process to launch.
Sticking to a particular user interface is not that bad. I do not find that as a fault in these later products you reviewed. In fact, I stopped customizing the toolbars when I switched computers and couldn't find any commands afterwards. I would welcome improvements "under the hood", such as faster handling of large images, keeping pace with time and what is considered "large". Higher bit depths, better conversions to lower bit depths with dithering. The problem is that these changes are not immediately visible to a user and are difficult to sell. The usual marketing vector: bigger than before, bigger is better, new is more, new is good, works so much more efficiently. In the short term.
Thank you for these publications.
J7N
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