Product Reviews

Most digital cameras come bundled with some form of photo-fixing software, but what if you want to get more creative? Unless you're seriously well-heeled, Adobe's professional image editor, the £500 Photoshop, isn't an option. For those on a budget, it boils down to a choice between Photoshop's little brother, the easy-to-use, but limited, Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro (PSP).

PSP has become known for offering more sophisticated manual features, but has been hampered by a cluttered set of controls, inherited from its beginnings as a piece of shareware. Now owned by Corel, PSP has been given a thorough reworking. Not content with a sleek new look, Corel has added more tools for creative photographers. It has also made the program easier to use, with a new Learning Center that offers step-by-step guides to browsing, editing and printing your images.

By default, Paint Shop Pro X displays a browser palette across the bottom of the screen. It's a bit cramped, with tiny thumbnails, but it's a simple job to drag it out and display it full-screen, using the Zoom slider to increase the size of the thumbnail images. This kind of workaround to avoid on-screen clutter will be familiar to those who've used older versions of the program - but at least this time there's plenty of scope for customising the display, as well as automatically hiding palettes when they're not in use.

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area in which real strides have been made is in quick, automatic fixes to common photographic problems. The program offers a click-and-drag Object Remover tool for 'painting out' unwanted objects or people - something that used to require painstaking work with the cloning stamp, copying over the offending areas with pixels borrowed from the background. This tool stumbled over particularly complex backgrounds, but generally worked well. Smart Photo Fix automatically adjusts colour and brightness, as well as allowing you to sharpen up mildly out-of-focus shots. There's also a one-click tool for reducing the digital noise that afflicts photos taken in low light. The excellent red-eye correction tool is still here, but a one-click tool has been added for quicker results. More frivolous additions include a Toothbrush for whitening teeth.

The highlights of previous versions of PSP have been its creative photographic tools. These are exceptionally well thought out, and address genuine problems such as lens distortion. PSP X supplements these with the virtual equivalent of traditional screw-on lens filters. These are a handy trick used by black-and-white portrait photographers to enhance images: blue filters increase contrast and definition, making skin appear craggy and 'interesting'; while orange smooths out wrinkles for a more flattering effect.

PSP X also comes bundled with Corel's Photo Album 6 application for organising and filing your digital photos. This offers little more than free programs such as Google's Picasa 2, but it's a handy inclusion all the same.

Corel has succeeded in making the best budget image editor even better. Among existing users, it's only really the digital photography enthusiasts who will consider it worthwhile upgrading for the extra photo tools. But beginners who might previously have been put off by PSP's busy, techie look have no more reason to be afraid. With a street price of just £79, Paint Shop Pro X is an incredible buy.