When it comes to photo manipulation software, the first name that comes to mind for most people is Adobe PhotoShop. That may be the preferred solution for many people, but it is also one of the more expensive options in the market. For people who are looking for a more affordable alternative, Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 could be a good option.
The MSRP has this Corel software listed at about $80, but many online retailers (like Amazon) sell Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 for as little as $35. That’s a very small investment to get a much more robust photo editing package than Microsoft Paint.
Working in much the same way as PhotoShop Elements, Corel’s X2 is meant to be a comprehensive solution that can be used to view, sort, process, and edit images at will.
As expected, Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 comes with a series of standard utilities for cropping images, adjusting contrast, and doing other basic tasks, but it also has a series of unique tools for altering your photographs and digital images.
For example, the HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photo Merge tool lets you combine two or more bracketed exposures of the same scene to produce one “perfect” exposure. This way, you get a better balance between shadows and highlights.
Corel has also included a number of so-called “makeover tools” for red-eye removal, blemish removal, teeth whitening, virtual suntans, and even a “thinify” tool to make people look skinnier.
For the amateur photographer who needs to process a large number of images, going through these pictures one-by-one can be a very time-consuming task. That’s why Corel has included Express Lab.
This streamlined mode allows you to edit several photographs at the same time, applying changes to many pictures in the same time that it normally would take you to edit just one. These include cropping, rotating, brightness and saturation adjustment, and red-eye removal.
Other notable features and tools include perspective correction to “straighten” angled pictures, depth of field control, object removal (an automated version of the clone stamp in PhotoShop), and RAW image editing.
Is Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 enough to dethrone Adobe PhotoShop as the de-facto photo manipulation software for consumers and professionals alike? Probably not, but it’s more affordable price point coupled with a number of consumer-friendly quick tools certainly makes for an attractive option.
