Product Reviews

Photo-Paint 10 isn't the first application to challenge the supremacy of Photoshop. But it is the first heavyweight standalone image manipulation application to run natively in Mac OS X. First offered as part of Corel's Graphics Suite 10 (see Reviews, 19 October 2001, p26), Photo-Paint 10 is now available as a separate application. It's an attractive proposition for the growing number of digital photographers needing high-powered image manipulation.

The first thing you notice is how much you get for your money. First off are versions of Canto Cumulus 5 (image management software) and DiamondSoft Font Reserve (font management). You also get more than 600 fonts and symbols provided as both TrueType and PostScript. And that's not all: on another CD, you'll find hundreds of images, Web objects, tiles and so on.

Once you've fought your way past these goodies, Photo-Paint 10 installs without fuss. If you're using Mac OS versions between 8.6 and 9.2, Corel insists that virtual memory be turned on, at which point the program will run on as little as 64Mb of RAM. Virtual memory can't be turned on if you have more than 1Gb of physical RAM. Nonetheless we found that Photo-Paint 10 worked fine under Mac OS 9 with virtual memory turned off, provided a good chunk of RAM was allocated to it. Under OS X, Photo-Paint 10 will run with 128Mb of installed RAM.

On opening the application, most of the menu items and tools will be familiar to any Photoshop user. However, the

Shadow play

Drop-shadow freaks will love the interactive drop-shadow tool. Tonal control is highly sophisticated with seven different methods, including the Sample/Target Balance - a powerful colour control similar to those found in high-end prepress software. Furthermore, the integration between Web-specific features and normal image manipulation in Photo-Paint 10 is a great improvement over having to hop between Photoshop and ImageReady. In fact, features such as full colour management, writing to PDF and preflighting - which is but one option of a richly featured print control - demonstrate Corel's attention to workflow and will please serious users.

In short, Photo-Paint 10's set of features is first-class. Unfortunately, there's a significant downside to this glowing picture: the program is frustratingly unresponsive. Even previews in dialog boxes are slow to show changes, while tools such as the zoom facility don't jump to attention when you invoke them. It's like driving a Land Rover when you're used to a Golf: although you love its ability to tackle anything, its sluggish behaviour becomes frustrating.

While its stability appears good, we did have to force-quit Photo-Paint 10 when our impatience made it trip up, and a glitch in the JPEG Export dialog box suggests a little more work is needed.

For the price, you obtain world-class power in image manipulation and a good deal of useful goodies. If its responsiveness were to be improved, Photo-Paint 10 would be a real alternative to Photoshop.

NEEDS: Power PC G3 or better, Mac OS 8.6 or higher, 64Mb RAM for Classic, 128Mb RAM for OS X