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

Next, Image Adjustments
Paint Shop Pro XI has just about every image adjustment tool one would want or need. From auto-adjustments to more refined and advanced tools, there are simply too many for me to cover here. There are, however, a few adjustments that Corel touts that I’d like to comment on, and a few special tools I found interesting enough to highlight here.

First up are a few automatic controls that Corel lists on the box that claim to take all the effort away from correcting your photos. In particular the Smart Photo Fix (with its accompanying “One Step Photo Fix”) and the Digital Camera Noise Removal (and its “One Step Noise Removal”).


Figure 4: Left to Right: the original photo, after One Step Photo Fix, and after Auto Levels.

The One Step Photo Fix is the first command in the Adjust menu, and when you click on it, the adjustment is automatically made to your photo. End of story. I found this to have varying degrees of success, sometimes correcting the photo nicely and sometime failing miserably. To see what the One Step Photo Fix is doing, simply open the Smart Photo Fix dialog and click Suggest Settings. Its suggestion is what the One Step Photo Fix does. I found I got better results by adjusting the sliders myself and even better results when I click the Advanced Options box and it displayed the levels graph, allowing finer control over the brightness levels. Ultimately, I found the Auto Levels button in the Levels dialog box produced the best results (for an automatic adjustment), even though it does not change the focus like in the Smart Photo Fix.


Figure 5: Before and after One Step Noise Removal.

The One Step Noise Removal function I found to be actually quite interesting. It’s basically a regular noise and smoothing filter – nothing we haven’t seen before – but by some miracle the auto function works very well. My Sony camera gives me notoriously grainy shots, and in low light conditions I often find myself fighting to ignore the noise. The One Step Noise Removal did impressive work on just about everything I threw at it. It did create some artifacting, but the results were definitely less noisy and looked more like an actual photo than a digital image. I even have to applaud it for its attempt at removing the noise from my infrared NightShots (it wasn’t entirely successful but gets an ‘A’ for effort). I’d say for those who just want to remove some graininess from their photo before they print it, the One Step Noise Removal should work just fine. The Digital Camera Noise Removal dialog is more confusing than useful, and I recommend the standard noise removal tools found in the Adjust menu if you want more refined adjustments.


Figure 6: The Crop Tool showing preset 4x6 dimensions.

The Crop Tool is quite cool. Clicking on it brings up a rectangle over the image which you can stretch to whatever size you like (the status bar at the bottom kindly tells you the dimensions of the crop box). What I found really useful is being able to select 4x6 from the drop-down and then stretch the 4x6 box to fill the photo, thereby cropping the photo to perfect 4x6 dimensions.


Figure 7: The Straighten Tool. Make the line parallel to the crooked object and it’s rotated by that many degrees.


Figure 8: Before and after the Perspective Correction Tool. No more climbing scaffolding for me!

The Straighten and Perspective Correction Tools are also useful. Straighten gives you a line on the image which you move to parallel a line in the image that should be true horizontal (like a crooked horizon) or true vertical (like a skewed building). Click the check button in the Tool Options bar and the image is rotated and the edges cropped. The Perspective Correction Tool works in much the same way, instead giving you a box for you to manipulate to the four corners of a perspective-skewed object. Clicking on the check box squares the object or image, simulating a head-on shot.


Figure 9: The Red Eye Tool works quite well.

The Red Eye Tool works much as expected: click on the red part of the eye and the tool darkens the red to black while preserving the specular highlights.