» Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI [OLD VERSION]

Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI [OLD VERSION] Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Not worth upgrading for
Comment: If you've never owned PaintShop Pro before, you'll probably find it to be a very capable program with a great price point compared to industry standards like Adobe Photoshop.

If you are a former and long-time PSP owner like me (since version 7), you won't find anything compelling about any version after 9, but you will get a lot of cruft that you'll probably never use.

In addition to not having any compelling reason to upgrade, PaintShop pro has become extremely annoying to use. In addition to all of the other user interface changes mentioned by other reviewers, Corel has installed it's own spam software which cannot be disabled.

It is simply not acceptable for any software which is not trialware or freeware to display ads while I am working, and the fact that the ads are from Corel itself does not excuse this horrid decision.

Fortunately for me, I've reached a stage in my career where my budget and business expense allowance enable me to obtain Adobe's far more expensive PaintShop Pro. While I prefer the Corel product's simplicity for most tasks and find it generally quite capable, that very simplicity is being further eroded with every version upgrade, and I absolutely won't tolerate spam, so this is the last version of PaintShop Pro that I will ever purchase.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Hold On Before Purchase
Comment: Like other reviewers here, I, too, recommend stopping at version 8. Above that, I've encountered glitches that drive me nuts. For example, with ver.9 and up, I often encounter dialogue boxes telling me my system is short of memory and cannot perform tasks at hand. The 1st time this happened, I had 3.5Gbs system memory. On a new computer, I had 4 GB and still encountered the problem. On my latest system, I have 8 GB system memory and I am still being stopped in my tracks for "lack of system memory". There are freezes, too, and, as others noted here, PSP X, XI up are painfully slow to work with. I really hated to say goodbye to PSP but it is no longer what it was when JASC owned the company.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Many, many problems
Comment: I've been a loyal Paint Shop Pro user since version 3. I've used it on major commercial design projects, right alongside Photoshop on my Mac and Gimp on my Linux box. Sadly, version XI is one of the poorest software builds of any product I have ever seen. It locks up, won't start, won't close, takes forever to load, and has issues with many fundamental functions such as JPEG formats, loading/saving files, cache management, and thumbnail generation! Really, it is just unbelievably bad. Worse, when it crashes, although you can kill it from Windows Task Manager, it will immediately crash if you try to launch it again -- you'll have to reboot your computer to get it to work. Moreover, it is painfully slow, even on my fast Intel Core 2 Duo box with dual-channel memory and SATA drives. My advice to users is to stick with Version 9.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not what I was expecting
Comment: I must admit I am a novice in respect to digital photography but this program is a little too complicated for me (more than I can handle at this point). The cyber-shot viewer that came with my camera met my needs for photo editing but did not offer a "delete picture" option or the capacity to print to a disk. I thought the print to disk option was a part of the Paint Shop package which it does not appear to be.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Happy Customer
Comment: I purchased this program specifically to pick images from two different photos and place them on a third picture as a background.

It worked great. For the most part this is a relatively easy program to use and it can do big tricks...

I like it, would recommend it.

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