Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate

Are you a professional photographer who prefers to work in 14 bit raw file format? Ya aint-a gonna do it with this program! I very recently purchased a Nikon D700 DSLR, which came with Nikon Software Suite (which I successfully loaded on my 64 bit Vista operating system) and a trial version of Capture NX2 (not loaded yet). When I pull up my images in Nikon View the detail and color depth are spectacular and must be seen to be truly appreciated. When I use Corel to pull the very same image from the very same Nikon folder, it comes up in psp with colors slightly washed out and lacking in the same detail I get in Nikon View. Not only that, but when you want to modify the image, PSP tells you that you must demote your image to modify it! Now I don't know about you, but I find it unacceptable that first, when Corel cannot even LOAD a raw 14 bit image without essentially turning it into what looks like a jpeg image before you even modify it! Oh! golly gee whiz, it won't let you save the image in it's original raw file format either. I know some of you realize that Corel does NOT claim to support Nikon D700 raw file format, HOWEVER it does allege to support raw files from the Nikon Coolpix 8700 camera which my wife has! So does Nikon View... and the model 8700 images look better, sharper and with better color in Nikon View than what you get in PSP. Am I picky?? Yeper! I expect that when a program says it supports a particular format, that it will display it unchanged when you load it in! Save your Cafe' Mocha money for the rest of the year and get Photoshop CS4.

I first used the "Free Trial Offer" Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate that the Corel.com site offered and I loved it so much I wanted to buy the program, but I didn't want to pay the price of $89.99 for just the downloaded version I wanted the CD. I searched the web and found it at Amazon.com for $49.99, plus Amazon offered a $20 rebate, so it only cost me $29.99, what a deal. Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate is all I'm ever going to use to edit my photos. Now that I have the CD I can use it on both of my computers. Thank you Amazon for making the Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 affordable to me.

PAINT SHOP PRO PHOTO X2 ULTIMATE ACADEMIC EN (DVD CASE) ( PSPPX2ULTENDVDA )

This program has every thing someone with minimal graphic skills could want. It'll keep you busy learning new features for many months to come.

I do graphic design and marketing and do much with photographs in my day job. This is a go-to program for me both at home and at work. To me, there is more to use and it's easier to follow than even photoshop. It's what my non-artsy honey learned to use at home too simply via the video turtorials...which make it all come together quickly and easily if you have no experience.

There are endless ways to use this. I've edited wedding photos so that the photo is vintage but the flowers are in color for dramatic effect. I've taken photos and just made them into outlines (like a coloring book picture) so that I could transfer them to a canvas and paint them, I've made wrinkles easily disappear when doing corporate photos and made teeth whiter in one button click, I've edited out wires under a table and made grass greener for real estate photos easier than can be imagined...

ah, I could go on and on...and that isn't even mentioning the things you can do just for fun and "art"...like make a photo look woven, or like it's tiled, or has a corner curling up...

to me, there is so much for the advanced user here but I think a strong advantage is that, for the beginner, the tutorials, in my opinion make that user more quickly become advanced and be able to do so many more things than in other programs such as photoshop. The tutorials are all you need to do pro work quickly.

It's hard to wrap up all that can be done in a mere brief review. So, suffice it to say, I've used so very many programs and this remains our go-to program. In fact, when I've shown all that can be done on Paintshop ProX to photoshop users such as the realtors I work with, I get em to switch over to this side!

I'm runing a Pentium 4 processor with 4GB of RAM, and this program just takes forever to load, and mostly crashes at start-up. I also use Nikon Capture NX2 which works well on my system. This program has been nothing but frustrating for me, and Corel has been no help. SAVE YOUR MONEY!