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149 of 161 found the following review helpful:
 Somebody please stop Corel from ruining good softwareFeb 26, 2010
By Nerd3D
Since Corel acquired Paint Shop Pro it's been all down hill. X3 is the Apollo 13 of paint programs. A total disaster. If you have more than a few images on your computer be prepared for a 2-3 hour installation ordeal. The program will crash and freeze several times as it attempts to catalog the entire contents of our computer. Thanks, but I already know where my pictures are, really. Should a "Pro" program be brought to it's knees repeatedly by a large catalog of images? Corel evidently thinks so.
The cause of all this trouble is the "Organizer". Man oh man what a train wreck. It's whole purpose in life seems to be so you can rate your pictures. I really don't need to rate my picture. Really? rate my own pictures... OK but I generally just delete the lousy ones but what ever. It would be of some use if you could use it like a browser, but no. There is no way the keep the "Organizer" open after selecting an image to edit. You can't even keep your place as opening an image automatically closes the "Organizer". When you go back your at square one go find it again. If I want to open several pictures from different folders... well let's just say it's much less than useless. If you don't want to use their exact work flow you are up a creek, a very slow creek as switching between editing and "Organizing" is glacial.
Well we got one new tool! Oh goody, I can do a lousy job of taking somebody out of a picture in one click. Whoop-de-doo! They did make the Text editing tool less stupid that it was, but it was pretty stupid. The new method is less awkward but still needs work.
What didn't we get? Well the majority of the editing tools are still 8 bit. If you want to work with your raws and maintain 16 or 32 bit per channel keep looking because there has been no improvement.
Now for the bad news when you decide to uninstall the demo. Corel really wants to put the screws to you for daring to uninstall their epic bloat ware. The uninstall literally took 45 minutes, It was stuck on 36% for at least 30 minutes.
In summary I would only recommend this to people I really don't like.
134 of 148 found the following review helpful:
 So much potential, yet so disappointingFeb 19, 2010
By Geoffrey
"said_geoffrey"
I'm an avid Photoshop/Lightroom user, but I like to examine other products that can improve my workflow and digital retouching. Photoshop is a great program, but simple changes are often time-consuming. Lightroom, while great 95% of the time, does not do everything for me. With that, when I saw that Corel released PSP X3, I was compelled to examine the product.
I've tried PSP in the past with mixed results, but thought I would try the new X3 version through the 30-day free trial available on Corel. I immediately had several problems. My machine is a workhorse (8GB, Phenom II X4), and while loading pictures into the catalog during initial startup, the software completely crashed multiple times on me. Okay, not off on a good foot, but I finally got my pictures loaded and began playing with some of the editing features. The menus were a little obtuse, and sometimes it is not easy to find editing options through the Full Editor. The Express Editor, while a little bit better, also had settings that were a little too deep in the menus. This is not really a flaw, though, since with a little bit of use I got fairly comfortable with the options.
I noticed that the presets in PSP X3 were really good and that I can really make a photo look good with less work (time) than I would need in Photoshop for the equivalent output. However, my gripes are as follows:
*Buttons for commands are really outdated and look rushed. They don't flow well with the rest of the program and they are somewhat hard to click consistently.
*Product clearly wasn't tested with any level of depth. On any given hour, PSP X3 will crash at least once, which is unacceptable, especially given that I've run this on such a powerful machine.
*The histogram isn't what you'd expect to see if you're used to Photoshop or looking at your camera's histogram. It could use some improvement.
*In one case, the white balance in "Express Editor" is completely inverted. While the function works, it registers 2000 as "warm" and "7500" as cold, when it should be reversed. This isn't a big gripe and can easily be fixed, but demonstrates the lack of testing.
*No LAB color mode. This isn't a big surprise, since PSP has never supported this, and truthfully, only a small fraction of people probably use LAB, but I'd like to see it eventually since it is a big part of my workflow.
*MY BIGGEST GRIPE: When you edit a photo and go back to the library (Organizer) view, it always puts your cursor back to the first photo of the library. For example, you have 250 photos from your kid's birthday party. You look at them in the bottom organizer panel and pick #115 to edit. If you close #115 and go back to Organizer, it will not remember your place, so the view will start from photo #1.
There is really a lot of potential here that could easily shine with a patch update. However, given Corel's history with X2 and X2-Ultimate, I don't expect them to address these issues anytime soon. If they fix a majority of these problems (name product stability and the Organizer issue), then I'd recommend it, especially for the price.
33 of 34 found the following review helpful:
Extremely disappointingMay 10, 2010
By LC
I have been a fan and a customer of Corel for many years, and upgraded to the X3 version of PaintShop because of its potential, but only to find it very disappointing. To start with, the activation will not recognize the Internet connection, so it forces you to call. OK, not too bad, I think. So, I call the number provided (an 800 number) only to find out that I have to call another number (not a toll free number, mind you) to activate the product I just purchased from Corel itself. This bothers me, but I thought it should not be too bad, so I checked their business hours, and called well within them (right in the middle of their business hours on a business day), but only to find a recording telling me that their office is closed. The call is then disconnected, and so am I from Corel. Enough is enough. This is becoming a joke.
Looking at the software itself, the idea of incorporating the photo organizer in the program was a big step back, not forward. On first load, it takes forever to index all the images I have in my computer (literally thousands of them, since I use them for work). It just reminds me of another version of the cheap Corel Snapfire, rather than a serious, professional product as this claims to be.
The GUI looks like it has been just thrown together, without all that much planning and thinking. Very awkward to use, especially with the integration of the organizer, which will return you to the first image, forcing you to scroll through your hundreds of images before you can get back to what you were working with. It forces you to use their own work-flow, which is quite awkward if you work with a lot of images from different locations. All in all, you might say you can get used to the new GUI, but that "organizer" is an absolute disaster, and should not have been embedded in the program.
I am afraid that my long term relationship with Corel as a customer is coming to an end. I have seen several of their products get worse and worse, especially if you plan to use them in a semi-professional or professional manner.
39 of 43 found the following review helpful:
UnstableMar 07, 2010
By Rojohn
"Redwing"
I installed the trail version on a Win 7 64 bit machine with 8 GB of RAM. The first several hours went fine but then the program stopped responding any time I tried to go from one component to another, that is between the Editor, Organizer and Express Lab. Doing a restart did not help the problem. I stopped trying to move from component to component and just tried to work in the Editor but the program shutdown while working there too. It looks like it has a lot of nice features and for the money it would probably be a very nice program if it ran without problems. Applying some of the effects takes quite a bit of time even with 8 GB of memory! One option I did like is that you can use "large icons" in the user interface which helps when the monitor is set to a high resolution. They were very small and hard to read on the default setting. I have not explored much of the program but if it continues not to run, I probably never will. Too bad, I think it has potential.
22 of 23 found the following review helpful:
Keeps scanning my computer for photos forever!May 28, 2010
By Freeman8
I can't say how good this software is at editing photos because all it ever did after installation was scanning my hard drive looking for photos. And since I have over 23,000 photos in the My Pictures folder, this was taking forever. Corel does not give you an option to stop this scan or opt out of it. It just does it as soon as you open Paintshop Photo Pro. I absolutely hate this invasive feature and uninstalled the software half an hour after installing it. I don't understand why I couldn't just open the pictures I want, like in PhotoShop, instead of waiting for these useless, time-consuming scans? This is one very unhappy consumer.
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