PaintShop Photo Pro X3 Ultimate

I have used many photo editing programs, and - while this does not have the power of Adobe Photoshop CS5 - that is not a financially similar product. This is more a rival of Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 (Win/Mac). I use Elements a lot, and find it robust and powerful, but also a complete computer systems hog with a huge learning curve. This program, Paintshop Photo Pro X3 Ultimate, is much more user friendly and computer resources friendly.

I was easily able to make the most common modifications to photos and do batch edits without any trouble at all. The program is smart, fast, and good a predicting what I want to do next. I especially appreciated the comprehensive RAW editing tools.

I intentionally loaded this on an underpowered system to see how it would handle a slower XP machine, and it did great! Install itself was a bit slow, but running the program was fine. I then installed it on my main machine, a powerful Win7 Pro computer, with extensive graphics support. It ran just as flawlessly.

This is missing some of the very high end effects tools available in Elements (such as tons of plugins), but has 99% of what most people will use are in there.

I would recommend that anyone considering purchasing Photoshop Elements, also give this program due consideration. Both give a lot more functionality than free versions of many photo programs, including Picasa.

You must agree to the following when installing, IF YOU READ THE ENTIRE THING:

1.19.3 You hereby acknowledge and consent to Corel:
monitoring your Use of the Product,
authenticating and periodically verifying your licensing rights in the Product,
collecting, transmitting, using, and sharing with Corel's third party marketing partners, data relating to you and your Use of the Product for advertising, marketing, operational and other purposes,
accessing, utilizing and altering the existing functionality, including any default settings, of the computer system on which you Use the Product, and receiving in-Product messages from Corel and its third party marketing partners,all in accordance with Corel's Privacy Policy located at [...].

Altering the default setting of the computer system...are you kidding me.
This is nothing more than glorified Spyware for them.

Get Photoshop instead, it will cost more, but no pop ups from 3rd party marketing partners of Corel and they can't change setting on your System.

Paintshop Photo Pro X3 Ultimate is the best photo/image editing software I've ever had! I requested it for Vine for my husband who is an avid semi-amateur photographer. I'm not very good with photo editing software myself because they usually have so many buttons to click, so many steps to go through. This doesn't mean this version of Paintshop doesn't have that many steps. But what I like about it is that it immediately opens to a workspace that has a menu of things you can do on the left side with a logical work flow as you go down the list. At the top of the list is Get Photos (where you can choose photos from your CD, computer, external drive, USB, camera, cellphone---absolutely anything that has a USB attachment that you can plug into your PC).

After that selection is Adjust, which enumerates the simplest and most straightforward ways to make your pics look their best. Express Lab is my favorite, and I use it often (specifically the Suggest Settings) to retouch photos before posting them on Facebook.

Other commands in Adjust are Rotate Left; Rotate Right; Crop; Straighten (for tilted photos);
One-Step Photo Fix (convenient if you're in a hurry, but the results are not as good as Express Lab's Suggest Settings feature);
Smart Photo Fix is like One-Step except that it allows you to set your own levels for brightness, shadows, color saturation, etc., and it also has a Suggest Settings button for error-free fixes;
Resize;
and finally Advanced Adjustments, which open up a whole new menu of selections that include Perspective Correction, HDR Merge, One-Step Purple Fringe Removal, Digital Camera Noise Removal, Depth of Field---all terms I'm sure a professional photographer is familiar with. (I don't understand most of these, so I leave these tools for my husband!)

If you're feeling more creative or adventurous, after Adjust is Retouch and Restore that allows you to do a lot of things to your pics:
Fix Red Eyes - the simplest and all important step in group photos; despite how some cameras are now good with taking out the red light reflex in eyes, I found this very useful with pets whose eye light reflex seem bigger and would still appear on cameras that eliminate red eyes in people.

Skin Smoothing literally erases wrinkles (you kinda wonder if this is what skincare and makeup websites do to their photos so you'd think their products really will do wonders for your skin in the time they promised they would).

Makeover lets you remove blemishes and shows you the steps to do this.

Scratch Remover does the same thing as Makeover, except that it removes scratches and folds from scanned old photos you might have.

Clone Brush "covers flaws and distractions", but I haven't tried this yet.

Object Remover is my favorite! It takes away anything from the photo that you want out. It takes a little getting used to, though, and if you just have a mouse it can be very tricky. This is awesome if you have a digital pen attached to your PC so you can draw more exact outlines around the objects you want taken off. Otherwise, if you use the mouse the outline will be straggly, and whatever filler you want to replace it with will be in the shape of the straggly outline. I think this part could use additional steps, though, such as allowing to cover a removed object with another object.

Color Changer changes the color of what I like to call drab-looking objects in your photo that make an otherwise bright or great-looking photo look depressing. When you click on this, it opens up a palette of colors which you can choose to apply to inanimate objects in the picture (I usually do it on backgrounds like walls and floors) if you want the subjects in the picture to be the center of attention in your photo.

Fade Correction is as the name implies. Great for old pics, especially those from your great grandma's, scanned into the computer!

Selection is like Object Remover except that it allows you to retouch only single items in a picture and leaving the rest of the picture untouched. You may also need a digital pen for this for more exact changes.

After these first 3 items on the main menu (Get Photos, Adjust, Retouch and Restore), the only other selection from this menu that edits photos is Effects. This selection allows you to make new photos look old by converting them to black and white, sepia, or infrared. Under Effects is also a selection called Film and Filters that mimics the effects of different camera filters if they had been applied to your photo when the picture was originally taken.

The other 3 biggies on the main menu are Collage (great for photo projects, Powerpoint presentations and slides, and for addition later to an HD video, all of which are for when you use the included Paintshop Photo Project Creator); Text and Graphics (adds words and objects to your pics); and Print and Share.

These are just some of the things you can do with Paintshop Photo Pro X3 Ultimate. The name of the product is actually misleading because it has at least 3 more additional programs included in the box:
1. Paintshop Photo Project Creator - lets you make a photo book (is that what they call albums now?), greeting cards, collages of pics, calendars using your own family and pet photos, slideshows for use in Powerpoint (very handy for me), and other Projects. It has links to post whatever you made to Facebook, Flickr, or YouTube and has options to back up your work to disk as well as ordering printing and backup supplies.
2. Painter Essentials 4 - lets you convert pics into paintings.
3. Corel KPT Collection is an add-on that works with Paintshop and downloads proprietary graphics from Corel's website and has additional filters. I'm not entirely sure if these kicked in when I experimented with Film and Filters under the Effects selection in Paintshop.

Overall, this is a very, very, very good photo editing software! I can't stress that enough because you really have to see it to believe it. At the price of $50, I think you're getting a very good deal because I truly believe this product is worth more than that. My high-school-age kids have actually started using it for some of their projects, and if kids can use it, so can you. What's really nice about it is that it has elements that can satisfy both amateur picture-takers and professional photographers, as well as Facebook and YouTube addicts like my kids and I. A product like this should be a must for aspiring professional photographers and directors, video producers, or cameramen because the investment outlay is so little compared to all that you'll get from it. One of my kids who aspires to be a cameraman someday already has Corel Video Studio Pro X3 working hand-in-hand with Paintshop Photo Pro X3. I actually wish I was more computer savvy so I can tell you how the other elements work like the Photo Project Creator and Painter Essentials, because if the main Paintshop program itself is excellent, then the others must be, too.