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When I first came across Paint Shop Pro it was marketed as a shareware utility designed to convert graphic images from one format to another. Since those early days it has developed into a full-featured commercial graphics application that saw itself as a budget-priced competitor to products such as Adobe PhotoShop. Recently a change of ownership, as Corel purchased Jasc (Paint Shop Pro’s original developer), has seen the product take on a more focused approach to its perceived market.

Corel Paint Shop Pro X (strange how the letter 'X' is regarded as more appealing to the consumer than the prosaic numeral '10') is aimed squarely at the digital photography user. You even get a picture of a digital camera in the product’s opening flash screen. Incidentally Corel has managed to speed up the loading process of the software. On the test machine, Corel 9 took 15 seconds to load while version X only needed 13 seconds. While the two second difference might seem small, it does quickly add up for regular users.

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Anybody familiar with previous versions of the product will immediately notice another difference as the program’s interface has had an overhaul. Corel has added a Learning Centre pane to the left side of the screen while a browser palette sits at the bottom of the work area. Either of these two additions can be moved around, docked at each side or closed when more workspace is required. The program will remember the last location of these items whenever it restarts.

The Learning Centre, as you might suppose from its title, provides step-by-step assistance in carrying out common photo-editing tasks. You can get images from a camera, scanner or folders of your hard disk; make various adjustments and remove flaws; plus add special effects and integrate photos into projects. The results can then be sent to the printer or shared with others via the bundled copy of Corel Photo Album 6 software.

By default the product will automatically check your My Picture folder and add its content to the browser palette. This browser palette will display resizable thumbnails and Meta data of the currently highlighted image. Other folders can be quickly accessed and items selected for transfer to the work area. With an image in situ you can begins to use the various tools provided by Paint Shop Pro. A number of these tools provide one-click solutions as you remove scratches, fix red eye and automatically have the brightness and contrast adjusted. Other useful tools include the ability to straighten a crooked picture and apply a warp brush or grid to distort a particular area of a picture.

More constructively you can create a collage of images; add text, shapes and graphics; plus enclose a favourite photograph within a frame. This latter item can be fairly standard or you could use one of the fanciful frames that are supplied. These frames include a film strip look, stained glass and an antique vignette. For even greater effect there is the picture tube tool that lets you decorate a photo with professionally-designed artistic objects - maybe zoo animals or butterflies.

Earlier I mentioned Corel Photo Album 6. The standard version of this software is included as part of the Corel Paint Shop Pro X package. It brings organisational and sharing facilities to the party and will be the subject of a review of its own in the near future.

Corel Paint Shop Pro X has taken a big step forward especially with regards to ease of use. While its new interface will appeal more to the novice user, the product still packs enough power to satisfy the experienced user who wants to enhance their digital photo collection.

The recommended system configuration for this product is a 1.0 GHz processor with 512MB of RAM and 500 MB of hard disk space. You will need either Windows 2000 (SP4) or Windows XP. It comes with two hours of free Lynda.com video instruction and has a price point of £99.

http://www.corel.co.uk/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Corel3Uk/Products/Display&pid=1047025446809