* Color Management - Color matching and convenience seems to have been a primary target of X5. There's various dockers and screens that assist with color.

* RAW Support - This may have been there in X4 but it wasn't in X3, so it's new and nice for me. Some functions, such as the Touch Up brush, appear to disable when editing RAW, however.

* Object (Layer) Docker - This is now better organized and customizable. This is helpful since Photoshop really dominated Corel when it came to Layers. They probably still do but at least Corel is making headway.

* Better Grayscale Conversion Control - You have some control on how colors get converted. Note that this may sound trivial, but conversion to B&W is pretty weak on most photo editing software, so every little bit of improvement we can get is big.

* Various Other Improvements - Hexadecimal color value entry, better compatibility with other apps like Photoshop CS4, image straitening, and so on. (Image straightening keeps crashing my app, however, but I expect them to release a patch soon as it just came out a month ago.)

* Multi-Core Processor Support - Lets you use the speed. It does seem faster on my Athlon X2 box than X3 did.

- No HDR functionality. This is disappointing.

- No new panoramic image support beyond the Stitch function which has been there for awhile.

- No improvement in the Touch Up brush. This is again disappointing because Corel's was already so much of a weaker tool than Photoshop's Spot Healing Brush, even on the CS2 version I have. I was really hoping they'd put some resources into it. Just at the same time Photoshop is releasing their even more powerful Context Aware tool, too.

- Doesn't appear to have any additional effects. We really could have used a few new fun things there.

I've been using the CorelDraw Graphics Suite products for many many years. I favor Corel PhotoPaint over Adobe Photoshop for the bulk of my work - minor to medium level cleanup, sharpening, and compressing. I have been a serious Photo Paint user for over 4 years now and just upgraded from Corel X3 to X5.

So what's new in PhotoPaint X5? Surprisingly, very little. The user interface looks the same and Corel really hasn't added an incredible amount of new content to this version of PhotoPaint in this version. It looks and seems to operate 95% the same as X3, but they have many small improvements, and what they did change is mostly peripheral and under the covers.

I think this version shows the limited resources Corel dedicated to upgrading Photo Paint from earlier versions. Perhaps a smaller company like Corel must choose wisely, or perhaps, as I've heard, they're more excited about their Paint Shop Pro app these days than Photo Paint (I haven't used PSP in many years, so can't comment). PSP may even replace Photo Paint one day.

Where does Corel PhotoPaint X5 or earlier versions really shine? I would say speed, ease-of-use, sharpening (MUCH better than CS2's !!), color accuracy, nice blend of capability and simplicity (consider their Image Adjustment Lab .. 70% of the time this does everything I need except sharpen). And of course, price.

In all, Photo Paint will not overtake Adobe Photoshop in our lifetime but I still think it's superior to PS in speed and in user interface layout and operation, and I continue to use it for most of my photo editing.

Customer Service

Haven't used.

Similar Products Used:

Adobe Photoshop CS2.