Product Reviews

Paint Shop Pro X2 is a credible alternative to Photoshop CS3 and its low-cost counterpart, Photoshop Elements, and makes regular appearances on best-selling software lists.

It combines Elements' home-oriented features, such as wizards for guiding users through common tasks, with powerful tools that Adobe reserves for CS3, such as layer masks and Blend Ranges. Colour correction includes precise curve editing and benefits from histogram displays. Creative effects include warping tools absent from Elements, plus localised Hue and Saturation brushes that CS3 lacks. It can export in CMYK colour, used to prepare images for professional printing, but can't work natively with these files. For this, it's worth splashing out on CS3.

In our review of Paint Shop Pro Photo XI (Labs, Shopper 228) we criticised the lack of layer styles, so it's great to see them added here. They comprise drop shadow, glow, reflection, bevel and emboss effects. Unlike similar tools in the Effects menu, they're applied non-destructively so that the layer being affected can be edited further. This is ideal for text and designing buttons and other furniture for websites.

The improved Makeover Tools are designed to make your portrait shots look more attractive. Blemish Fixer works well and the Suntan tool is quite convincing, although it's not possible to delete areas if you go over the edge of an area of skin. Toothbrush and Eye Drop are hopeless at whitening teeth and eyes. These one-click effects attempt to guess the edges of the area to be processed, but rarely look convincing and often

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made subjects appear to have stuck their faces in a bag of flour. Thinify is even worse: it uses a coarse warp that looks more like a squashed photo than a thinner subject. It's more likely to perplex or offend people than impress them.

HDR Merge is a new tool for combining up to five photos taken using exposure bracketing. This is where a camera takes several identical shots, but at different exposures. HDR Merge is useful when shooting subjects with very bright and dark areas (known as a high dynamic range, hence HDR), since different exposures are required to capture the detail in darker and brighter areas. HDR Merge attempts to combine the best bits of each to produce the perfect shot. The resulting images have less contrast than the originals, but by compressing the dynamic range, both the highlights and shadows become well exposed. However, the areas in between are a composite of both images, which can lead to ghosting if there's even the smallest amount of movement between shots. Even so, this feature is easy to use and a lot of fun.

The new Express Lab is a simplified interface for quickly improving batches of photos. It includes crop and rotate tools, effective colour correction, the same Makeover tools described above and red-eye reduction. It resembles the editing functions found in photo-management software such as Picasa (Labs, Shopper 238), which is no bad thing. However, it's a shame its file management isn't proficient. The main part of the application has an excellent Organiser module for sorting and tagging photos, but this is only partially accessible from Express Lab.

Other new features include a darker-coloured interface that is less distracting when making colour adjustments, subtle watermarks to add your name or web address to images and various other improvements. Overall, this is a valuable update that's just about worth the upgrade price of £49.

For first-time buyers who need advanced features but can't afford Photoshop CS3, it's the obvious choice. However, for most home users, Photoshop Elements' friendlier interface and its excellent integration with online gallery space make it the better product.