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Product Description
Product Description
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Corel PaintShop Pro X4 gives passionate photographers more to love with hundreds of photo-editing features, a streamlined workspace, new pro-level effects and one-click sharing. Retouch photos faster. Create the perfectly exposed image or achieve a surreal, artistic effect with the HDR module. Remove distractions and combine the best elements from a series of shots with Photo Blend. Plus, have fun with the new Selective Focus feature and mimic expensive tilt-shift lenses to turn a scene into a miniature world. Managing and editing all your photos is easier with redesigned workspaces and dual monitor support. When you're ready to show your best photos, sharing to sites like Facebook and Flickr is just a click away.
Key Features and Benefits
Professional-quality tools in a streamlined, intuitive workflow
With PaintShop Pro X4, you get the photo-editing tools you need to create the professional look you want. Fix common flaws with standard editing tools. Retouch photos quickly with adjustment tools and filter effects that let you extract unwanted objects, blend colors and apply professional lighting effects.
Stunning effects
Take advantage of over 50 adjustment filters and 112 special effects to fine-tune your work. Merge photos taken with different exposures to create a stunning, perfectly exposed image with the new HDR module. Or experiment with the tonal range to get an intriguing, surrealistic look. The HDR tools in PaintShop Pro X4 are ideal for revealing hidden details in backlit scenes like sunsets. Try it with a series of photos taken using the auto-bracket feature on your DSLR.
Get the look of tilt-shift photography without expensive lenses using the new Selective Focus feature. Turn a scene into a miniature world or use it to add depth of field.
Combine photos easily
The new Photo Blend tool lets you combine the best elements from similar shots to create your ideal photo. For example, remove unwanted cars or people from a street scene, or take the best smiles from a series of group shots.
Impressive results--fast
With new performance updates, including GPU optimisations, PaintShop Pro X4 is the fastest version yet. More real-time effects--including Noise Reduction, Vibrancy, Tone Mapping and others--let you see the results as you work. Start up time is drastically reduced, plus the interface is faster and more responsive.
Streamlined workflow
Enjoy an easy and intuitive editing experience with tabbed workspaces that mirror your natural workflow. Move freely between three modes:
- Manage--quickly browse, tag and organise your photo collections
- Adjust--easily make powerful adjustments and quick fixes
- Edit--take advantage of professional tools for photo editing, image composition and graphic design
You can also access the Organiser directly from any workspace, making it easy to review and rate your photos. Use trays to gather and access images from several folders and refer to the new Shot Info panel to instantly see details about the camera and image. New dual monitor support lets you manage your photos on one screen while editing on the other. Plus, try new Adjustment Layers to experiment without changing your source image.
More detailed photos
Brighten shadowy areas of your photo without changing the rest of the image with Fill Light. Try the Clarity filter to draw attention to subtle details, dramatically increasing the texture and depth of your photos.
Custom borders
Apply a custom fade to the outer edge of a photo to emphasise the focal point of your image. With the new Vignette effect, you can use intuitive sliders to control the appearance of the edges by choosing the shape, colour and tone, and adjusting the amount of blur, glow and feathering.
Robust RAW Lab
Get a better look at your images with a larger preview area in the redesigned RAW Lab, which now supports more camera models and opens your images faster.
Built-in social media sharing
Share your photos faster with one-click sharing to Facebook and Flickr straight from the Organiser window.
View larger.
Professional editing power
New: HDR tools: A totally new set of HDR tools in PaintShop Pro X4 is designed to let you take full advantage of photos taken with auto-bracketing features on DSLRs.
You can use Exposure Merge to combine photos taken with different exposure settings to create perfectly exposed images. Ideal for high-contrast backlit scenes, such as sunsets and interior window shots, Exposure Merge lets you bring out colour and detail in the foreground, midground, and background areas. PaintShop Pro X4 has built-in HDR-adjustment presets, or you can save and reuse your favourite configurations as a preset.
For photographers who use auto-bracketing often, Batch Merge is a time-saving tool for quickly processing HDR sets. It lets you merge multiple bracketed sets of photos at the same time to achieve a custom, uniform look across a series of HDR photos. Batch Merge lets you save your results to a 32-bit HDR file so you can refine it later. In some cases, this might be all you need to get the look you were hoping for. In other cases, you'll want to adjust the results in Exposure Merge.
New: Photo Blend: Getting a group shot where everyone looks their best just got a lot easier with Photo Blend. This new feature lets you combine the best features from a series of photos to create a perfect image. For example, you can swap out a blinking photo subject from one picture for a better shot of that person. And if the only thing that stands between a good photo and a perfect one is an unwanted element, Photo Blend makes it easy to remove unwanted portions of images. You can even get creative by showing the same person multiple times in a single photo.
New: Fill Light and Clarity filter: Using this one powerful filter, you can fine-tune the brightness and clarity of your photos. The Fill Light/Clarity filter simplifies brightening shadows or darkening light areas without affecting other portions of the image. You can also soften or sharpen subtle yet important details in shots.
New: Selective Focus: This new effect lets you transform a real shot into a miniature model. Selective Focus, often referred to as a tilt-shift effect, lets you intuitively adjust the depth of field and increase saturation to create the illusion of a toy-like miniature scene from a photo. You can also use Selective Focus to draw attention to important parts of an image by blurring out busy surrounding details.
New: Vignette: PaintShop Pro X4 makes this classic photo effect easier than ever to create, tweak, and apply. The new Vignette feature adds a soft outer border that fades to white or black so you can draw attention to the most important part of your shot. Easy-to-use controls let you fine-tune the shape of the edges and the amount of blur, glow, and feathering. In addition, an instant preview lets you quickly see how the effect looks.
Enhanced: Camera RAW Lab: The Camera RAW Lab is now easier to use with a larger preview area and an improved histogram that help you quickly assess your adjustments. In addition, new highlight recovery options mean that you can restore detail in overexposed areas.
Enhanced: 16-bit support: PaintShop Pro X4 has extended 16-bit support to a range of tools and adjustments, giving you even more precision and flexibility when working with RAW formats.
Over 20 tools have been upgraded to 16-bit support, including the Scratch Remover, Paint Brush, Object Remover, Colour Replacer, Warp Brush, Mesh Warp, and Background Eraser.
Performance
Enhanced: Application speed: PaintShop Pro X4 has more than 75 performance updates, including GPU optimisations, that help ensure a fast, efficient working environment. Effects, such as Noise Reduction, Vibrancy and Tone Mapping, can now be applied in real time. Skin Smoothing, Smart Carver, Depth of Field, Blur, and Smart Photo Fix have also been refined to offer enhanced speed and performance. In addition, Camera RAW decoding is faster than ever.
Enhanced: Full-screen review: The Quick Review feature has been tweaked to offer full-screen image review so you can quickly and easily view, delete, rotate, and rate your photos.
Usability
New: MUI support: Great if you're working on a multilingual dual-byte system, new native multilingual user interface (MUI) support means that you can display text from multiple interface languages on a single PC. Now, there's never a problem working with photos that have foreign characters in their filename.
Enhanced: Workspace: PaintShop Pro X4 has been redesigned so you can move between photo workflows in a click. The application has three tabbed workspaces each dedicated to a different stage in the digital-photography workflow. The Manage workspace gives you everything you need to review and organise your photos. You can find the most frequently used image-correction tools in the Adjust workspace, and the Edit workspace provides you with a full range of professional-level editing tools. No matter which workspace you're in, the Organiser palette is always displayed, so there's no need to go to a separate workspace or application to find more photos.
New: Dual monitor support: Because you can never have enough screen space, PaintShop Pro X4 lets you manage your photos on one monitor and edit on another.
Product Description
Customer Reviews
The packaging is excellent and the software is contained inside on a single disk. However...if you are of a nervous disposition this is the time to take your meds... it comes with a clear and colourful manual!!! I am torn between saying 'how retro' and 'what a relief'. The manual is small enough to be readable and large enough to be an adequate reference. I recommend this product thoroughly.
Although never fully feature or key compatible with its considerably more expensive rival, it has offered some unique features that were missing from Photoshop. Consequently, some digital artists will use both packages in order to gain the best of both and results perhaps not possible with either alone.
Because of its price level, a comparison with Photoshop Elements is probably not unreasonable, but in my view it surpasses PE with many more features although perhaps less learner-friendly, which PE definitely is. That does not mean that Paintshop is unsuited for casual use, but it is a very feature-rich package and consequently has a great many supporters. To obtain the best from it, you will need time to learn its features and capabilities, which are very extensive.
The program will import files in approximately 50 or more different graphic formats, including some that are now rarely used. For digital camera users, it also supports about 25 different RAW formats so that just about everyone should be able to import, improve and perhaps publish their work. If a format is not now supported, or something new is developed, Corel will add the necessary support package fairly promptly.
With its feature-set and at this price-point, it is a worthy consideration and a lively competitor to Corel's other graphics software and also to its considerably more expensive and more famous rival, unless you ABSOLUTELY must use the alternative.
Although compatible with Windows versions back to XP, it is best with Windows 7. As with all graphics software, more memory is definitely better. Unless restricted to a 32-bit system, I would definitely recommend a minimum of 4Gb RAM and 6GB or more if you intend to be a power user. It will then make life much easier and provide faster results.
At the price, a no-brainer. Recommended.
This product has historically been second in any race with Photoshop Elements (come on, its not in the same price bracket as Photoshop). But to both myself and my wife it has been the most stable and easy to use of the two. This fantastic product has a wonderful working space with the new tabbed workspace - there are tabs for "Manage", "Edit" and "Adjust", which really helps with managing your workflow.
There are a host of shortcut buttons for quick adjustments and (glory be) a proper booklet with proper hints & tips on how to get the best out of the product. This is a really really good product. You will still get the photoshop snobs, but this is as good a product, if not better for most users.
Other major differences:
HDR module is just fabulous
RAW lab is ok, but a bit... Read more
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