Digital Home Thoughts: Corel's Paint Shop Pro Photo XI: A Minor League Slugger

First, Some History
Way back in the days of yore, (in this case late 1992), I went to the software store to buy a new ‘drawing’ program to replace my only-so-useful PCPaintbrush (for DOS!) and to go with my spiffy new Windows 3.1. There were two programs on the shelf: Adobe Photoshop (newly released for Windows) and the program I walked home with, CorelDRAW, which included a ‘free’ photo-editing program (Corel Photo-Paint). A few months later I heard about Paint Shop Pro, a shareware program by Jasc Software, that you could download from various places. I remember checking it out, but ultimately set it aside as I already had a program that did everything I needed it to. I continued to hear about PSP, however, as it grew into a respectable photo editing program.

In 2004, Corel bought Jasc, and the next year released Corel Paint Shop Pro. My initial reaction was “Why? They already have a perfectly good photo editor in Corel Photo-Paint,” which Corel was trying to sell as a stand-alone product at the time. I also had raw memories of the Ventura Fiasco and was hoping the same wouldn’t happen to Paint Shop Pro. In fact, the reasoning behind Corel’s decision was never really clear to me until I sat down with the product and gave it a spin.

And Now, a Word about Graphics Programs
Actually, two words: Vector and Raster. You see, computer graphics come in the two completely different flavors of vector and raster, which can be loosely thought of as wireframe and bitmap, and are usually dealt with in two separate programs. Raster (or bitmap) images are square things that can be measured as “so many pixels by so many pixels”, whereas vector images are math-based and are not limited to things like resolution. The computer ‘remembers’ a vector file as a series of points and lines, whereas it ‘remembers’ a bitmap as a grid of different-colored pixels (a map of bits). Think of those behind-the-scenes interviews you’ve seen where a 3D model is shown as a wireframe skeleton and then again with skin and clothing. The model is drawn in vector wireframe and then ‘rendered’ into a raster image for insertion into a movie frame. Digital photographs are raster graphics (bitmaps).

Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW are examples of vector graphic programs and Adobe Photoshop and Corel’s Photo-Paint are primarily raster graphics programs. Both Adobe and Corel expect you to use their two programs in conjunction with each other, preferring to keep the two graphics universes more or less segregated. What makes Paint Shop Pro special is that it combines both bitmap editing and vector illustrating tools in one program that costs less than a third of the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, and a twelfth of the price of Photoshop and Illustrator together. Paint Shop Pro is able to create and edit layers of both raster and vector objects. OK, end of graphics lesson.

At Last: Initial Impressions
Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI comes in a lovely box with a fancy fold-out panel touting all its features and specifications. It’s obvious they’re hoping to convince people with the packaging alone. It is mighty impressive. Inside the box, however, is a program disc, a product authenticity card begging to be lost and a user guide that’s smaller than the one that came with my camera. I don’t know what I was expecting to find inside, but after a box like that, I guess it would be more. I thumbed through the guide and found much of what it was showing me to be self-explanatory, plus it continually referred to the in-program Learning Center, so I didn’t bother to read much of it. I also tend to learn things by doing rather than studying, so reading a software manual is only so helpful to me (undoubtedly an example of why Corel included a Learning Center). One thing I did notice is the guide assumes right off the bat that you know the difference between raster and vector graphics. For a program aimed at home users who haven’t necessarily used graphics software before, (but just bought a spiffy new camera), I found this to be surprising.

Installation from the CD was quick and uneventful. It should be noted that Corel included a copy of their Snapfire Plus photo and slideshow sharing software, and 2 hours of Paint Shop Pro training on the CD. I didn’t really check them out and won’t be reviewing them here, but it’s nice to see some effort put into making the program easy to learn.