Okay, right off I like this one 50 times better than PhotoShop. It's just SOOOO much easier to use (in my opinion). Maybe it's because I've used it for a lot longer than PhotoShop, but it's just a pleasure to work with.
Strengths:
Ease of use. Cost is quite a bit cheaper than Photoshop, with many of the same features.
Weaknesses:
It's not so much of the "standard" like Photoshop is. But, due to it's ease of use, and that it can do most of the same things, maybe it's worth it.
Having used Phto-Paint 8 for about one year, I find it to be a heavy weight product. Although not quite as deep in some aspects as Photoshop, it offers a better value, especially when packaged with Corel Draw. I am not a professional, but have advanced beyond beginner status, and use this product extensively. It is good for photo -manipulation and runs fairly quickly. A number of good plug-ins come with it, and many Photoshop ones will work also (I use Kai 3.0 with no problems). The product has a nice set of paint tools( including image sprayer), somewhat deeper in this aspect than Photoshop. Also, Photo-Paint seems to work well with Corel Draw. The JPG preview feature which shows what each level of compression will look like (before saving) is especially useful. The controls are deep and on occasions not intuitive, but there is a fairly good help file available, and full textbooks in Acrobat format. Also lots of Corels traditional freebies (scan, trace, and capture programs). In my view, the best value in this type program.
I've used PhotoPaint 7 and 8. Both have more bells and whistles than I'll probably every use. I like the built in tutorials to get me started. I think the older "7" was easier to use, maybe because I was used to it and knew were all the tools were, maybe it's just the RC factor - resistance to change. PhotoPaint may not have all the support that PhotoShop has, but it is cheaper... not as inexpensive as JASC's PSP - but somewhere in between. I'd say PhotoShop is your Infinity Q-45. PhotoPaint, your Buick Park Avenue. and PSP your Grand AM. All will get you from A to B, all depends what you are willing to pay to get there and the comfort level you require.
Rating Reviewed by: Alexander Karasev(Unregistered User)
(Expert)
Review Date May 22, 2000
Overall Rating 5 of 5
Used product for 2+ Years
Review 4 of 7
Summary:
It is not easy for me to stay impartial when talking about a software product as slick, intuitive, and powerful as I believe Corel PhotoPaint is. I love it!!!
Please don't take this as coming from some excited newbie who got started with a random piece of software and sticks with it / praises it simply because it's the only one he / she knows / is comfortable with (not that there's anything wrong with that :-) I have worked with Adobe PhotoShop, PhotoPaint's major and admittedly dominant competitor. While PhotoShop is a powerful program and an industry standard, here's a brief run-down of some of the things that I feel are great about Corel Photo Paint, which made it a more compelling choice for me.
1. The interface. While obviously a matter of personal preference, I find PhotoPaint's interface superior to the PhotoShop's on several levels. Firstly, in many ways PhotoShop's interface was built to resemble a darkroom or a pre-press workshop. You've got your layers ("acetate sheets") and your dodging and burning tools (like in a conventional darkroom), etc - so that folks coming from that "old school" photo background feel more at home. By contrast, Corel PhotoPaint's interface recognizes digital imaging as a craft and an art form in its own right, with its own tools and models, not those restricted to the more "familiar" physical things in the past. Don't get me wrong - the PhotoPaint has a full complement of brushes and dodging / burning and other tools, and layers (and in fact its workspace can be configured to look like PhotoShop's). Secondly, speaking of configurability, PhotoPaint is simply amazing. You can remove commands from menu's that you are not using. You can take your most used commands (e.g. file open - equalize - unsharp mask - resample - etc.) and copy or move them into your own menu. This way you won't have to navigate those other menu's for most used tasks. You can customize where each of the toolbars is located and what buttons it has. Lastly, Corel PhotoPaint's object model just seems less restrictive to me than PhotoShop's. Instead of PhotoShop's layers, PhotoPaint has objects which are image elements that do not have to take the whole image area (hence memory efficiency) and have a few other pizzazz.
2. The Color and Computational Fidelity Corel PhotoPaint has been supporting 48 bit color depth (16 bits / channel) for the last 3 versions. The latest version's support is both stable and efficient. This support is handy when doing multiple alterations to the image while keeping the additive rounding errors at bay that would be creeping up in a 24 bit image, eventually ruining its smoothness. I realize of course that PhotoShop has added 48 bit support as well - however I urge you to look past the advertising glossies - "having" this support is not just about being able to open and save the image in this format and do trivial stuff like resampling and rotation by 90 degrees. A great many of Corel PhotoPaint's tools and filters now support 48 bit color, including sharpening, histogram adjustment, brightness, contrast, gamma, geometry, etc.
Speaking of geometry, it is one of PhotoPaint's areas of especial strength (no doubt an influence of its Corel Draw! sibling :-). Suppose you are working on a photo of a building that is a teeny bit crooked and was taken with a regular (i.e. non-perspective-control) lens, so the walls appear to converge towards the top or it looks "leaning back". You want to rotate it and apply a trapezoid type conversion to "stretch" the top. Well what you can do in PhotoPaint is keep tweaking it until it looks just the way you want it, without worrying that successive non-linear geometry calculations will fuzzy up the image (which they of course would in PhotoShop). When you are done, you double-click on the image and PhotoPaint calculates the resulting non-linear translation formula to get from the *initial* image to the final one in a *single* step (that's right, combining trapeziod and rotation and what-have-you-other calculations into one!!) I just love that quality preserving feature!
There's so much more but this review is pretty long as it is I'm afraid. The bottom line is, at what may be less than the cost of a PhotoShop upgrade, I think many PhotoShop users would do themselves a favor if they check it out.
I have been using PhotoPaint since it came out, along with all the others that are available. If you need a wide variety of tools, then Corel Draw (with PhotoPaint and all the rest) is for you. This package has always had its' quirks, but I have always liked it. PhotoPaint is one step below Photoshop, in my opinion, but it's cheaper, and may do the job for you quite well. If you want to integrate with a drawing package, go with Corel.
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