Corel Paintshop Pro X9 Review

New Features in Corel Paintshop Pro X9
Compared to some past new PaintShop Pro releases, version X9 is a bit thin on new features and improvements. One new feature is text presets, which give you instant text effects that combine things like colour gradients, shadows and 3D effects. Many of these presets aren't what you'd call classy though, being rather reminiscent of some Microsoft WordArt text effects from over a decade ago. Thankfully these presets can be customised, and you can also pony up and purchase premium text presets to get more attractive options.
Another preset-themed fresh feature is the New from Template option. While the normal new project option does include initial customisations like resolution and paper size, selecting New from Template reveals project templates that make it easy to create things like collages, greetings cards or brochures. What’s more, since they work by using multiple layers and layer masks, they can be extensively customised. But, like the text presets, if you don’t fancy any of the standard project templates, more can be purchased separately.
Next there’s X9’s new screenshot capturing capability. This lets you capture screenshots and have them automatically and consecutively open as separate images in PaintShop Pro. There are plenty of capture customisation options, including automatic capture size and aspect ratio options and selective screen area capturing. This screenshot feature certainly speeds up multiple screenshot capture, but when taking the occasional screenshot, the traditional method of simply pressing the Print Screen keyboard key and pasting the clipboard screen capture into a new image file will usually suffice.
A new feature that’s less easy to replicate is the ability to export an edit history. This could be useful if you want to document a particular editing process for making a tutorial, or simply recreate a certain look at a later date.
There's also a new Gradient Fill tool which allows you to select an area of an image and apply a gradient within the selection.
Finally, PaintShop Pro’s batch processor has been upgraded. As well as automatically applying a watermark to multiple images, an image frame, or batch resizing, Corel has added PaintShop Pro’s Smart Photo Fix feature as one of the batch processing functions. This has already been available as a standalone tool to enhance individual images, and works by automatically boosting brightness, adjusting white balance, focus, saturation, and contrast, while also leaving scope for manual tweaking.
Loading comments…