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

Onto Image Editing and Effects
Just like Adjustments, there are just so many editing tools and effects filters you can use that I just can’t tell you about them all. Again though, I’d like to highlight a few features of interest.

The Makeover Tool, touted highly on the box, is really a ring-type clone tool (Blemish Fixer), a brightener brush (Toothbrush) and a tinting brush (Suntan Brush). My personal recommendation for anyone aspiring to be a photo re-toucher would be to learn the conventional clone, dodge and burn brushes, but I guess one could think of these as specialized ‘facial’ brushes.


Figure 10: With the Scratch Remover Tool I was able to remove the power lines and most of the telephone pole in about a minute.


Figure 11: The Object Remover Tool removed the boat reasonably well.

The Scratch and Object Remover tools are rightly grouped with the Clone tool on the toolbar because they’re simply slightly advanced versions of the Clone tool. The Scratch Remover is like a linear clone that samples the pixels around the line you draw and replaces the area behind the line with randomized sampled pixels. It works great on telephone lines in the sky, not so much on telephone lines across detailed clouds. The example in the manual is removing a scratch from a photo where the scratch runs across the woman’s solid, dark-colored hat. The tool probably wouldn’t work if she were wearing a patterned hat or one with feathers in it. The Object Remover works in a similar fashion. Draw an irregular outline around the object you want to replace, draw a box around the area you want to replicate, and it repeats the pattern found in the boxed area randomly within the irregular area. I used it to remove the boat from an ocean scene and got reasonably acceptable results (I would still have had to touch it up manually).


Figure 12: One sweep of the Background Eraser.

I had lots of fun playing with the Background Eraser. The box promises the ability to easily cut an object out of one photo to put in another. I found the tool took some getting used to, but once I got the hang of it, I was convinced it could be really powerful, especially for those quick-and-dirty cutouts I often do at work. The Background Eraser doesn’t actually cut the object to the clipboard or even select it for you – you still need the Magic Wand tool for that – but it does cut down a major portion of a graphic artist’s work.


Figure 13: The Color Changer works OK, but don’t expect magic things from it.

The Color Changer tool is something I eyed suspiciously when I first saw it on the box. The box features a man in a green shirt and next to it the same man in a blue shirt. The text next to it says “Change the color of anything in your photos using the Color Changer.” In the manual is a picture of a little girl with a dark dress and then a light dress. [Note to Corel: Please stop printing user manuals for graphics programs in black and white.] The caption says “One click can change the color of the girl’s dress.” These are hefty claims and I was anxious to see if they were true. In essence, the Color Changer tool is just like the Color Replacer tool that we’ve all used for ages, but in this case the program attempts to guess what the ‘base’ color is and changes it, attempting to preserve the shadows and highlights in that area. Well, after playing around with it for a while, I was, in fact, able to change the color of the shirt of someone in a photo of mine. It was, however, nowhere near as easy or straightforward as was alluded to. With a little persistence, you can in fact change an object from one color to another, and the results are actually pretty impressive. It’s just not very easy.

Other effects were pretty standard or rather ho-hum. We all know how Emboss works, and while I’m not interested in making my photos look like they’re from the 1850s or giving them frames, I did try both the Time Machine and Picture Frame features. Some people may find them entertaining. I found them safe to ignore.