Paint Shop Pro Photo X2

List Price: $99.99 Discount Price: $42.75

Features:

• The ideal choice for any aspiring photographer's digital darkroom; an array of graphics tools and creative effects help you transform their photos into one-of-a-kind artistic images
• Fix brightness, color, and photo flaws in a few clicks; use precision editing tools to create the picture you want; give photos a unique, exciting look using hundreds of special effects, and more
• One-of-a-kind Express Lab helps you quickly view and fix dozens of photos in the time it used to take to edit a few
• HDR Photo Merge helps you combine two or more photos taken at different exposures, and then automatically dodges and burns to bring out the contrast
• Includes a built-in Learning Center to help you get started; it's the easiest way to get professional-looking photos--fast

Customer Reviews:

Picture Yourself Learning Paint Shop Pro X2 [Posted on 2008-04-27]
Diane Koers has done a good job making difficult tasks easier. The book is well laid out and the wording is simple and understandable.

Photoshop A Much Lower Price [Posted on 2008-05-02]
I must say that the Paint Shop Pro X2 is a superb piece of software. The layout and interface are user friendly. The PSP is also feature rich. Unfortunately the only drawback that I can see is that the PSP is low in performance even when running on Intel Core 2 Duo (2GHz) microprocessor and Radeon GPU. Anyhow, this product is highly recommended for those who love photoshop yet cannot afford one. The PSP is definitely the best substitute!

Awesome features, provided you're willing to wait for them [Posted on 2008-05-05]
When I purchased my new, Vista-installed computer, it came with a demo for Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X1. It was similar enough to the Paint Shop Pro 7 that I'd been using for years that I ended up buying the license, and I loved and used the program daily for the next several months -- until the program became corrupted and all efforts to uninstall and reinstall it were for naught.

I decided to upgrade when I found out that X2 had became available, thinking that the newer version would be even better, right?

Well.

The Good Stuff: it has a variety of awesome features that are great for photo editing. I use the histogram and brightness/contrast level adjustments constantly; they're easy to use and perfect for fine-tuning lighting and shadow. The fade correction is also one of the best features for correcting a photo with bad white-balance. Some pre-installed effects like the Time Machine, Filters, and Sepia are fun to play with and are a quick way to turn ordinary photos into something unique.

The Bad Stuff: it takes five to ten minutes to even open the program. If interrupted in the process of opening, it may freeze and have to be completely shut down and restarted. It freezes in the middle of saving pictures that are no more than a few hundred KB. This shouldn't be happening on a system with 2GIG RAM. When I ran PaintShop Pro 7 on a Win98 computer with 218MB RAM, it wasn't as slow as this program. I have this powerful photo editing tool, and I've started using free-ware more just to avoid the slow loading and the constant shutting down/restarting in the middle of my projects.

Overall: When it works, Photo X2 does it's job well. But the loading and freezing turn any projected into a tedious and cumbersome chore.

Paint Shop Pro 2 [Posted on 2008-05-10]
I really haven't taken the time to play with this software yet, but what I have done, just some simple editing of old pics, it seems easy to use and has some amazing functions. I can't wait to really get into Photo Shop Pro and see if I can make some banners... which is why I wanted the software in the first place.

Another great installment in the Paint Shop Pro franchise. [Posted on 2008-05-12]
I'm a big fan of Paint Shop Pro. I had version X before which turned out to not be compatible with my new Vista computer, so I bought this. There aren't a whole lot of new features, but what is new is great. Another solid installment in the Paint Shop Pro franchise. Highly recommend this product--for its very inexpensive price you get loads of features comparable with Photoshop CX2. Very hard to beat.

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