Corel PaintShop Pro X9 | ESD

Corel PaintShop Pro is a program that families and small businesses can grow with; it's easy enough to use for novices, but offers a depth of functionality that will satisfy serious photo enthusiasts, creative consumers and office workers tasked with graphic design. Its excellent help and learning guides make it fun and feasible for novices who will soon graduate to more in-depth editing and project creations.

Managing Your Photos

Corel PaintShop Pro has a tabbed interface (Manage, Adjust and Edit) similar to Adobe Photoshop Elements. Unlike that program, however, Corel's Manage area is fully integrated into the rest of the software, which makes for a smoother workflow.

Use the Manage workspace to import, organize, name, caption, rate and search your photos. It offers full control over metadata and keywords, including a nice Map mode for geolocating where you took the pictures. Facial recognition works rather well, though not perfectly (which is the case with all such pattern-recognition software we've tested). The keywords and people's names you attach to your pictures carry over when you post them to social networks.

While PaintShop Pro supports RAW files, you can't see them in the folders view where you can open other types of files. Instead, you have to go to File/Open, which then brings the file into the Camera RAW Lab window. (This is similar to Adobe's Camera RAW utility, though not as robust.) After Corel processes the RAW file, the image opens in Manage, and you can apply all the usual edits to it.

Advanced Photo Editing

The Edit workspace provides a full range of photo-editing tools, suitable for even serious photographers. Here you can adjust colors and exposure, change shape and size, add text and effects, create collages and composites, paint shapes and colors, and do just about anything else to perfect or alter your photograph. Edit features include context-sensitive erase and move, great selection tools, HDR processing, layers, and masks.

Most of X9's new features and improvements are found here, such as the New from Template command, which goes right into a projects window. There, you can create collages, cards, brochures, Facebook banners, Instagram collages and other projects by simply dropping photos into templates. However, while many of these templates are free, some will cost you $2 to $7, depending mostly on the type of project. Fortunately, the price appears right on the template, so you can't accidentally choose one without knowing exactly what you're getting into. Incidentally, you can save a custom layout as a template for future reuse.

Corel has always had great customizable gradient tools for creating attractive color blends, such as metallics or rainbow-like spectrums. With X9, rather than designing your gradient in a separate window, you now create and edit your gradient directly on your picture, dragging and dropping colors and nodes as you work. That way, you can see exactly how the changes affect your image.

Paintshop Pro's versatile text tool was already one of our favorites among photo-editing programs, thanks to its ability to wrap text around pictures and fit text to shapes. It now has a more streamlined options ribbon and new text style presets (some free, others for purchase). Additional presets are added monthly.

Another rather valuable new feature is that you can save the entire history of edits related to any picture as a text file. That's useful for creating tutorials, as well as maintaining a legal record of any and all changes made to an image.

PLEASE NOTE:  Product keys carry a 30 day warranty.  Keys need to be used/activated within this 30 day period.  Keys not used/activated within this period will not be covered under warranty and will not be refunded/replaced if they fail to work.

What is included?

You acquire an unused, valid product key to activate the software.

Software type: Electronic Software Download (ESD).

There is no disk included (no CD / no DVD). This is not a physical product. .

* Retail packaging is NOT included.

After payment you will receive via email:

- Product license key.
- Instructions to download, install and activate.

Your order will be automatically delivered to your provided email address within 5 minutes. Kindly check your junk mail folders also.

 
 * IMPORTANT NOTICE: No DVD and No packaging included. This is not a physical product.