Corel Releases PaintShop Photo Pro X3

"Corel Corporation today announced Corel® PaintShop Photo(TM) Pro X3, the latest version of its renowned photo editing program, that brings advanced photo management, editing and creative tools together to deliver everything the photo enthusiast needs in one package. Combining professional quality tools for organization and photo editing along with burning, sharing, and for the first time, high definition (HD) video capabilities, Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3 has been developed to meet the evolving workflow needs of today's digital photographer."

PaintShop Photo Pro X3 - probably still better known as it's original name PaintShop Pro - is the latest version of this program, and X3 adds some interesting features into the mix. I had a chance to speak with Craig Copley from Corel and get a demo of the software recently and jotted down some impressions about what I thought was noteworthy. Corel built a new organizer to enhance workflow - various preview modes are available, which reminded a bit of ACDSee. ExpressLab is a quick editor that allows you to make basic fixes quickly and easily, whereas RAW Lab is their raw editing tool - it looks a bit crude compared to Adobe Camera Raw, but seems to have most of the basic functions. In the organizer you can pick up settings on images - so if you have a group of images and you adjust one of them, you can apply the changes to the other images. Adobe Lightroom has a similar feature, and it's a huge time saver. Copies of the original image are kept so you can restore it if you really muck things up.

Smart Carver is their tool for removing objects from an image - it's not an object extractor like I originally thought (they have a tool for that too) - it allows you to select then "vanish" a portion of the image. Based on the demo I saw, it works quite well. Project Creator allows you to quickly create photo books, cards, collages, calendars, slideshows, upload projects to Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, order a backup disc, make a photo slideshow, and order photo prints. Whew. Yeah, there's a lot crammed into this software!

PaintShop Photo Pro X3 is multi-processor and multi-thread aware, but there's no GPU support at this time. They have an HDR photo merge tool with a cool feature I haven't seen before - it has an auto-select based on the time, with a slider for the time threshold in seconds. The HDR tool looks pretty basic, but it will help rescue areas of exposure that would otherwise be lost.

You can check out the full press release, download a free demo, or purchase it for $99 USD (less if you're upgrading). There's also a bundle for $149 USD that comes with VideoStudio Pro X3.