limona's Full Review: Corel Paint Shop Pro 9 Full Version Volume License...
First, I want to note that I was prepared to love this product. I have been using Paint Shop Pro since version 4.0, and it is my graphics program of choice over Photoshop. I am an amateur photographer who takes and edits an insane number of pictures of my pet rabbits. I recently upgraded to Paint Shop Pro 9 from Paint Shop Pro 7. I have access to the latest version of Adobe Photoshop and I have dabbled with Adobe Photoshop Elements.
The requirements to run Paint Shop Pro 9 are as follows:
1.0 GHz processor or faster
Microsoft Windows XP 512 MB of RAM
500 MB of free hard drive space
32-bit color display adapter at 1024x768 resolution
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or later
I exceed all of the requirements by a significant margin, with the exception of RAM. I have 768 MB of RAM on this computer.
PSP used to be a program that did everything a hobbyist needed it to do in an intuitive fashion. It was my program of choice both for touching up digital photos and for making basic web graphics. I am sad to say that has changed. I am seriously considering going back to version 7. The only things I love about this version 9 over version 7 are the new digital photo editing tools, and I don’t think they’re worth dealing with all the bugs in version 9.
Paint Shop Pro 9 is not the Paint Shop I remember. It is now a Photoshop wannabe with a correspondingly higher price. While some of the new features are extremely welcome, e.g. the new digital image options and the enhancement to the crop feature so that it shades out anything that is going to be cropped, other changes were a disaster—for the life of me I can’t figure out how to do a gradient fill. My .JPGs all default to PSP because up until this version, PSP opened pretty quickly. Now it opens as slowly as Photoshop; I just opened it and it took it 16 seconds.
If you plan to buy version 9.0 regardless of what I say in this review, do yourself a favor and upgrade it immediately to version 9.01. Version 9.01 fixed 12 known issues with the program, including such bugs as vector objects with lines 2 pixels thick (and wider) displaying with 1 extra pixel, and the tiles effect sometimes dropping lines between tiles. Version 9.01 did not, however, address 17 known issues, and Jasc says these may be addressed in future updates. These include, for example, a little problem with the mover tool and the issue printing fails on very large 1 bit .TIF files. Based on my own experience with the program, I would not be surprised if there are even more glitches that are not “known” by Jasc yet.
I am very disappointed in this product, and I am waffling between downgrading to PSP 7 and switching to Adobe Photo Elements. I might do both. If you’re already using Adobe Photo Elements and are considering switching over to PSP 9, I would think twice before doing so. While PSP 9 does have some excellent, intuitive features for the amateur (and novice) digital photographer, the other features of the program are buggy—especially for the price! If you want to make graphics for web pages in addition to doing photo correction, this program is no longer an elegant solution. PSP 9 still manages to do a good job with photo correction.
For those who have PSP 8 and are considering upgrading, what follows is the official list of changes included in version 9:
*Adjustments: an option has been added to the Unsharp Mask filter to allow for sharpening of only the luminance component of an image. Previous results are attained by leaving this checkbox unchecked.
*Adjustments: changes were made to the Saturation and Lightness controls of the Hue Map filter to reduce color clipping problems.
*Adjustments: quantization errors were reduced and a slope-limiting gamma function was implemented in the Levels filter and adjustment layer.
*Adjustments: several changes were made to the Linear adjustment mode of the Highlight/Midtone/Shadow filter to correct banding between tonal ranges.
*Adjustments: the "One Step Photo Fix" script has been optimized as a standard command for faster performance.
*Adjustments: the Colorize command was changed to better match the lightness values of the original image. Legacy behavior may be obtained using the HSL filter in its Colorize mode (set Lightness to zero and set Hue and Saturation as desired). However, the range differences must be accounted for Hue (0 to 255 vs. 0 to 360) and Saturation (0 to 255 vs. 0 to 100).
*Adjustments: the Histogram Stretch and Histogram Equalize filters have been changed to operate on a visual scale instead of a luma scale.
*Art Media: a "PSP 9 Art Media" workspace has been provided for users who would like to start with an interface optimized for Art Media tool usage.
*Effects: Edge Effects>Find All, Find Horizontal and Find Vertical have been changed to provide stronger results. If you require the results of the previous (legacy) implementations, they are available as scripts and/or as presets in the User Defined Filter dialog.
*Effects: Edge Effects>Trace Contour has been optimized to produce closed contours.
*Effects: the Aged Newspaper effect was optimized to provide better results.
*Effects: the Horizontal Cylinder and Vertical Cylinder deformation filters were optimized to correctly produce cylindrical distortions.
*Effects: the Horizontal Perspective and Vertical Perspective deformation filters were optimized to correctly produce perspective transforms.
*Effects: the Sepia effect was optimized to provide better results.
*Effects: the Skew filter effect was optimized to correctly use the skew angle entered in the dialog.
*File Formats: the default Chroma Subsampling method for JPEG images has been changed to "YCbCr 1x1 1x1 1x1" in order to provide the highest quality images in most situations. JPEG compression levels have been adjusted slightly in order to provide equivalent file sizes as previous versions of Paint Shop Pro.
*Palettes: a new Frame tab has been added to the Materials palette, providing for independent selection of Hue values and Saturation/Luminance values.
*Palettes: the Histogram palette could sometimes display information in a misleading way. The drawing of the histograms was changed so that these problems are absent.
*Palettes: the Undo/Redo history previously found in the Command History dialog has been moved to the new History palette.
*Scripts: an "AddPSP8FileLocations" script is available to automate the process of adding resources from your "My PSP8 Files" folder to Paint Shop Pro 9 File Locations.
*Shapes: rectangle, square, ellipse, circle, polygon and star shapes can now be created with the new Rectangle, Ellipse and Symmetric Shape tools. The previous Preset Shape files have been retained for users who prefer to use them.
*Updates: an automatic updating function has been added to the program, allowing for automated downloading and installation of updates to the product. You can set the frequency of the "check for updates" feature or disable it by going to File menu>Preferences>Auto Update Options. The updater will run by default the first time you run Paint Shop Pro after installation.
*User Interface: the "Lens Correction" filters have been moved to the new Adjust > Photo Fix submenu.
*User Interface: the "Negative Image" filter has been moved to the Adjust > Color Balance submenu.
*User Interface: the "Red eye Removal" filter has been moved to the new Adjust > Photo Fix submenu.
*Web: HTML color values have been changed to lower case alpha characters in order to comply with XHTML standards.
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