Product Reviews

Paint Shop Pro - the program at the core of this Studio bundle - has long been a favourite budget photo editor at Computer Buyer. Over the years, its increasing sophistication made it less easy for beginners to use than Photoshop Elements. Version 8, which we first reviewed in our September 2003 issue, fixes many of these problems. It anchors the palettes off to the right-hand side of the screen to leave users with an uncluttered workspace, and neatly arranges the various tool options in horizontal bars across the top of the screen. At first, these still look intimidating, but fairly explanatory tool labels appear when the cursor hovers over each icon.

Paint Shop Pro's real strong point is the range of tools it offers for photographers. There's the same range of contrast and colour adjustments, but you have more flexible manual control. As well as auto-adjustment, it offers histogram control - allowing you to

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decide which ranges of colour or brightness you wish to adjust, and by how much. This enables you to concentrate of specific areas of highlight or shadow.

The real feather in this bundle's cap is its ability to correct the geometry of photographs - either reducing the heightened perspective created by wide-angle lenses, or eliminating so-called 'barrel distortion' that affects the shape of objects in photos taken using zoom lenses. This is particularly important, given the increasing power of the optical zoom lenses built into even budget digital cameras.

Rounding out the package is Paint Shop Photo Album 5, a photo organiser program with more sophisticated features than the Photoshop Elements' Organizer. It allows you to assign keywords, as well as providing greater manual control than Elements' Organizer over the size and appearance of thumbnail images. The only trade-off here is that Photo Album is slightly slower to create these previews than its rival, although this should only be a consideration for users with less powerful machines. Like the Creator part of the Elements package, Photo Album lets you assemble a range of Web albums, or burn your images to CD.

True perfectionists might want to wait for our review of Paint Shop Pro 9, in next month's Computer Buyer. But with version 8 now available in this bundle for £65 - a saving of £20 on its initial release price, version 8 is more attractive than ever to photographers looking to go beyond the hand-holding basics of Elements.