- Free paint shop pro alternative manual#
- Free paint shop pro alternative pro#
- Free paint shop pro alternative Pc#
Free paint shop pro alternative manual#
We don’t often comment on documentation, but the manual that ships with this package is exceptional. However, for simple effects, the new tools are pretty good.
Free paint shop pro alternative pro#
Paint Shop Pro lacks a watercolor brush and its cloning - that is, morphing an underlying image by painting with natural brushes on a layer of “tracing paper” - wasn’t very easy to work with. Unfortunately for Paint Shop Pro, I was reviewing Corel Painter 9 at the same time I was writing this review, so although I thought the new features in Paint Shop Pro were nice, they just couldn’t compete with Painter’s astounding breadth of features and exquisite sensitivity. It supports basic media types such as oil, chalk, pastel, crayon, pencil, and palette knife, and all were surprisingly responsive (see Figure 3).įigure 3: You won’t find an overwhelming abundance of natural media tools in Paint Shop Pro, but they aren’t bad for quick sketching. Paint Shop Pro’s new art media tools are an inexpensive way to experiment with digital artwork. In reality, most serious digital artists use Corel Painter, usually in conjunction with Photoshop - a costly combination that’s complex to learn. The biggest news in Paint Shop Pro 9 is the addition of natural-media brushes and surfaces. Notice that the edges show none of the pixelated artifacts you would see if you used a standard sharpening filter.Īfter you’ve tweaked your image, you can add captions and frames, arrange batches of photos in a template, and prepare images for Web graphics via image maps, rollovers, and slicing. The photo on the bottom shows the result after running the Clarify filter twice. On the top is an unretouched photo of a stingray taken in the murky waters of Thailand last summer. To give you an idea of the how good these filters are, look at the two images below (See Figure 2):įigure 2: Before (top) and after (bottom) running the Clarify filter. Other functions will fix color correct faded photos improve clarity and contrast and repair defects such as speckles, JPEG artifacts, scratches, and redeye. You’ll find filters that: remove noise remove chromatic aberration add fill flash and backlight and correct distortions such as pincushion, barrel, and fisheye. Some photo buffs will be pleased to see support for Raw camera formats (unprocessed, uncompressed data), but the collection of filters for touching up and reviving flawed photos are worth the price of the program.
![free paint shop pro alternative free paint shop pro alternative](https://www.mobipicker.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/coral-paintshop-pro-x9.jpg)
We admit to being bewildered by one change listed in the docs: “What was labeled the Layers palette in previous versions is now called the Layers palette.” Sounds like an improvement that originated in the Department of Redundancy Department.įrankly, I was awed by Paint Shop Pro’s digital photography features. Version 9 adds the ability to roll up palettes and pop them open or closed via a single click to save valuable screen real estate.Ī few minor improvements, such as the ability to associate a script to an icon and a more convenient Mixer palette for creating and mixing colors, make the interface easier to use. Paint Shop Pro has 10 palettes, and the workspace can become so cluttered with little boxes that it becomes impossible to do any actual work. You can easily scroll through the images with the backward and forward buttons - a much nicer way to wander through multiple documents than using the Window menu command. With the History palette, you can step backwards and forwards through your actions and save everything to a script to replay at another time (see Figure 1).įigure 1: The New History palette lets you retrace your editing steps, delete selected actions, save them to scripts, and apply them to other open documents.Īnother new feature that I really like is the ability to arrange open images in tabs at the top of the workspace. Photoshop has had this feature for years, and it’s nice to see this addition.
![free paint shop pro alternative free paint shop pro alternative](https://www.paintshoppro.com/static/psp/images/products/paintshop-pro/2022/ultimate/collection/photo-mirage.jpg)
Major improvements to the interface include a History palette that records every action you take while editing an image.
![free paint shop pro alternative free paint shop pro alternative](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/reviews/0684l1MsnWfoULBBSjmx2gz-68..1628538817.png)
Now that Corel Corporation has acquired Jasc Software, Paint Shop Pro’s developer, perhaps the application will get newfound respect. The list of additional features in version 9 runs four pages long, making the program a serious competitor to Adobe Photoshop.
Free paint shop pro alternative Pc#
There’s something for every PC user in here - general image editing, photo touchup, Web art, and new natural media tools for the artistically inclined. Combining an extensive range of bitmap-editing tools with some nice vector drawing and animation features, this program is a steal at $119. Paint Shop Pro 9 is a mature and very impressive application. These days it costs more than $20, but it’s also more than the cheapskate’s alternative to Photoshop. Paint Shop Pro started life as a no-frills shareware program for no-frills image editing.