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

Let’s Talk Interface


Figure 1: The main window looks deceptively complex.

Paint Shop Pro’s main program window at first seems cluttered on all sides, but like a dust cloud settling, your eye starts discerning the various parts and it all starts making sense. Along the top you have the normal File/Edit menus, below that the Standard New/Open/Save icon toolbar and below that the Tool Options ‘palette’, which changes dynamically depending on what tool you have selected. Along the left side you have the Learning Center which also changes based on the selected tool (more on that in a bit), along side which is the all-important Tools toolbar, which includes the selection, creation and effect tools. The bottom of the window sports a status bar, which shows the status of the image or tool (and is also the progress bar), above which is the Organizer palette, which by default displays your Pictures folder and the pictures in it much like a mini Windows Explorer. The right side has only the Layers palette open by default, but more palettes are added to the left and neatly stacked as you call upon them or use a function that requires them (like the color mixer). It’s a very efficient layout, but someone with a smaller screen may find themselves closing some of the palettes a lot. As it is, it leaves less room for the actual image on my 24” LCD than I’d like.


Figure 2: The Learning Center Palette.

The Learning Center palette is one of those tools that, at first, seems useful, but becomes less and less so the more you use it. Put simply, the Learning Center is a dynamic, interactive help file. Unfortunately, as with many help files, it never seems to have what I’m looking for. Fortunately, the actual help file is much more helpful! When you first open Paint Shop Pro, the Learning Center presents its home page. If you’re a new user and just don’t know where to start, this home page is a good place to start. From it, you can open, print, adjust, add text to or do just about anything with your photo...except actually learn how to do certain key functions. For example, opening a file (more on that in a second). In a branching fashion, the Learning Center lets the user drill down from general menus to the specific function they want. Unfortunately, it often leaves you there with no indication of where to go next.

For example, to open an image from disk (as opposed to camera or scanner), you click on Get Photos and then Organizer, which gives you a non-helpful description of the Organizer Palette. If the Organizer is closed, the Learning Center will pop it open for you, but since it’s on the screen by default, and it doesn’t even tell you what to do with it, I found its instructions unhelpful. It could have at least opened the Open dialog box. I did, however, find it useful when I selected the various effect and creation tools. In those cases, the Learning Center palette changes to tell you exactly what to do with the tool you just picked up. Even advanced effects I wasn’t familiar with were pretty carefully explained. So, props go to Corel for showing us exactly how to use the Crayon tool, but then taken away for not explaining how to open an image from a file.


Figure 3: The Organizer Palette is an essential tool in Paint Shop Pro.

While I may not like the fact that the Organizer Palette isn’t explained very well by the Learning Center, I do have to say it’s very easy and rather self-explanatory if you’ve ever used Windows Explorer. Split in two, just like Explorer, it shows a tree representation of your folders on the left and a space that shows thumbnails of the files in the selected folder on the right. Opening a file is as easy as navigating to that folder and dragging the image’s thumbnail into the blank space above. It remembers what folder you had navigated to last when you open the program, and I found it very handy when I was processing a bunch of files in the same folder (like the shots in this review). It also has buttons along the top that allow you to do certain things, like rotate an image without opening it, and printing a contact sheet (an array of printed thumbnails of the images in that folder). Best of all, it can be toggled open and closed with a button on the Standard toolbar right next to the Open button. Using the Organizer, you may never need that Open button again.

The Photo Tray Palette is an interesting feature that can certainly come in handy at times, but can largely be ignored by folks who just want to open, tweak and print a file. The Photo Tray allows you to gather ‘shortcuts’ to different images in different folders in one place for easy access. Images gathered in the Photo Tray can easily be opened and closed, which means you don’t have to have all those different working files minimized and taking up memory. When you activate the Photo Tray from the View menu, it pops up below the Organizer palette, bumping the Organizer up the screen (taking up even more screen real estate). From there, thumbnails from the Organizer can be easily dragged into the Photo Tray from their various folders. Once the shortcuts to your photos are in the Photo Tray, you can pretty much close the Organizer for the duration of the project.