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Vincent Oliver
Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3 review
Camera Raw lab
Many photographers are now shooting their pictures using a RAW file format, this ultimately gives you far more control on the way images look. PaintShop Photo Pro X3 has a new Camera Raw lab which at present supports over 350 different cameras, and will be updated as and when new camera models are announced. The Raw lab offers controls on; Exposure, Brightness (isn’t that the same thing), Saturation, Shadow, Sharpness. White Balance, all the settings that are usually found on camera, such as Sunlight, Cloudy, Tungsten etc.. Colour Temperature (the same thing as White Balance) Tint. Noise reduction on Luminance and Colour Noise.
The Camera Raw lab performed quite well on my Nikon NEF files. I managed to improve the colours and achieve an overall pleasant result, but nothing spectacular. However, I feel that the Raw lab needs a lot more features to make this a really useful addition to pppx3. I would like to see the inclusion of curves, lens corrections such as chromatic aberrations, vignette removal, UnSharp masking etc, Having said that, many of these options are available in the menus in PaintShop Photo Pro.
Vibrancy
This promises to be an interesting filter, it increases the colour saturation in areas that are lacking in colour, leaving well saturated areas untouched. The application of settings is straight forward, a simple slider with values from -100 to +100, generally a setting of +20 gives good results. I compared this to a straight Hue, Saturation & Luminance adjustment of +20 saturation and the Vibrancy filter kept colour under better control, giving an emphasis to blue (skies) whilst leaving flesh tones looking healthy.
8 Responses to “Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3 review”
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Paint Shop Pro X3 hs a problem with the latest update. Their response is this>
“Thank you for your e-mail. We have received a report that Service Pack 3 of PaintShop Pro X3 is causing this issue. The workaround here is to uninstall the program and update up to Service Pack 2 only. Do not apply Service Pack 3 yet.”
The program is up and running properly without service pack 3 installed. Corel is working on a fix.
Long time Paint Shop Pro user but stalled on V8 for many years.
Recently bought X3 but it is a bucket of problems. The re-write to suit Win7 and to introduce new features left it to be a very troublesome piece of software indeed. I’m running it on both Win7 and XP and same problems appear.
Many crashes and hangs and features misbehaving plus some serious problems with memory not being released under certain conditions (mostly found with Save-As).
A great program with great features but needs some response from Corel about fixing it so it can be used reliably for everyday image processing.
Don’t get me wrong, I do like the program and will persevere with it until they get it right, but be warned that it is a troublesome beast. Stick with X2 or earlier versions until it’s known that they have fixed it.
Regards…………. Guy
PaintShop Photo Pro X3 does have some very nice features as shown in our videos. Is it worth upgrading? Well, I would say yes it is for the extra features, it is not a major upgrade, but given the low price, it is a good value product.
Is there enough in it to make it worth upgrading to from X2 ultimate?
Just post features that people want to read and hopefully gain a better understanding of the topic you are covering. Good luck
Random question: I am just starting my blog, but how did you start gaining readership? was it just natural? I mean how did people start finding you?
Thank you for another good article about photo-i – digital photography: Corel PaintShop Photo Pro X3 review. Where else can people get this kind of information in such a concise way of writing? I have a talk next week, and I am searching for such information.
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