Corel PaintShop Pro X4 review

PaintShop Pro has only offered development tools for raw-format pictures since version X3, but sadly, they’re not much better than the last flawed effort. It now shows a bigger preview area and includes a highlight recovery function, but there remains a paucity of other processing options and the quality of the results simply isn’t up to scratch.

There are editing functions for raw-format photos, but they are rather flawed

Confusingly, sending a raw file to the Adjust rather than Edit mode gave a completely different set of raw-processing tools, which were a little better in terms of both control and output quality. However, they still lagged behind Photoshop Elements’ sublime raw processing, especially for noise reduction. Even more confusingly, it seems that PaintShop Pro’s two raw-processing modes are unaware of each other. After using the Adjust tab’s controls and then clicking Edit, we were invited to Save As and then process the raw file again from scratch using the other, inferior controls.

Raw processing aside, PaintShop Pro isn’t far behind Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 for features and output quality, but it’s the little things that add up to make a big difference. PaintShop Pro often kept us waiting while it updated the preview image, which made fine-tuning effects settings laborious, and the screen lagged behind our actions during fast brush strokes. It can still claim curve-based colour correction as an advantage over Photoshop Elements, but now that both support layer masks, PaintShop Pro is no longer obviously better for advanced users. It’s not quite as strong as Photoshop Elements 10, but comes a close second.