[.ca] Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2

• The ideal choice for any aspiring photographer's digital darkroom; an array of graphics tools and creative effects help you transform their photos into one-of-a-kind artistic images
• Fix brightness, color, and photo flaws in a few clicks; use precision editing tools to create the picture you want; give photos a unique, exciting look using hundreds of special effects, and more
• One-of-a-kind Express Lab helps you quickly view and fix dozens of photos in the time it used to take to edit a few
• HDR Photo Merge helps you combine two or more photos taken at different exposures, and then automatically dodges and burns to bring out the contrast
• Includes a built-in Learning Center to help you get started; it's the easiest way to get professional-looking photos--fast

Full-featured at a great price:
I couldn't possibly write a review describing how pleased I am with this product, especially at its price. I knew that there must be a happy medium between the outrageously expensive Adobe Photoshop CS line and my frutsrating experiences with GIMP (though the latter is an admirable and full-featured program as well). I bought Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI after evaluating my needs as a hobbyist photographer, and I have not been disappointed since. X2 adds several key features -- the most useful being the "Adobe Lightroom"-type feature called "Express Lab" that lets you navigate through your collection and make quick fine-tuning adjustments; I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of control that this feature gives you and the ease with which I can adjust, edit and sort through my photos. If you've used GIMP or Photoshop, PSPX2 will feel both familiar and foreign at the same time. Things work more or less the same, but every once in a while you'll catch a difference that reminds you it's a totally different program. But I have yet to run across something that I wanted to do that PSPX2 couldn't handle. It's generally quick and responsive on my Intel Core 2 Duo 6400 PC running Vista with 4GB of RAM. It also works great with my pen tablet, which lets me "draw" edits in a much more intuitive way. The "quick-and-dirty" consumer-level photo editing features all work as advertised and often surprise me with the ease and speed of good results: features like one-step photo fixing, skin smoothing, purple fringe fix, red eye removal, etc. The more powerful editing tools like clone brushes, background eraser, and "magic wand selection" really push this, though, into the "prosumer" category. It's far more fully-featured than its similarly-priced Adobe counterpart (Photoshop Elements). It even borrows a bit from its cousin, Corel Painter, in that you can paint with oilbrushes, pastels, etc. in a surprisingly natural-looking way. Most importantly, the program just works. PSPXI had a few annoying bugs that never got fully resolved to my satisfaction (involving CPU and memory usage and start-up times), but I have yet to experience similar problems in PSPX2. I highly recommend this product; it's a tremendous and full-featured piece of software at an incredible price.

I Am Finished Purchasing Any Corel Products Now:
At first this Corel product seemed promising and I was quickly singing its praises. I later found out that spyware was automatically installed along with this software without my knowledge. It really is a shame to have to be considered a potential software pirate when you are actually honest and really only desire to purchase a software product and be able to use it with no worries. I decided to let this inconvenience go and just live with the spyware issue in order to use Paint Shop Pro. During normal use of their product I experienced some software related problems and needed a little support. I thought if I went directly to their website I could easily inform Corel of the problem and get a quick and concise emailed response from their customer support. I logged in with my outdated user account,(My email address had changed since the date of my purchase and I needed to update this new information). I tried entering my new email address as well as a new password several times, (cookies enabled and firewall temporarily disabled). I got kicked out of the web page on every occasion. I was unable to update my account in any way. I subsequently checked to see if there was a direct email address to communicate with someone that was "human". I didn't find anything, although I could have wasted a lot of my precious time searching forums for potential answers if I had so desired. Instead, I was greeted with yet another HTML page providing me with an option to PURCHASE some support for the software I had bought. NO THANKS! I'll just buy a better product from the numerous competitors out there. Who does Corel think they are anyway. The product itself is not really all that bad, hence the ONE-STAR rating is mainly for the Customer Support Service which I think is absolutely horrible. In addition to all this nonsense; 1) I don't really like spyware running secretly in the background while using up extra resources on my computer and; 2) I expect companies to stand behind the products they sell to their customers. This is important to achieve customer loyalty and thus to ensure that the product/company continues to flourish. What does it take to include a little email support?, not a lot really. Apparently this is too much for me to expect from Corel. Anyway, I just decided to go ahead and cut my losses. I'll upgrade to a more professional and well supported application such as Adobe.