[DannyRaphael]

http://www.corel.com/

[Steve Conway]

Anyone purchased or upgraded yet?

Just a quick glance at Corel website doesn't look like there is much new in it. Also it's called Paint Shop Pro XI Photo which makes it sound like just a spin off of Paint Shop Pro X with a couple of changes photogs may like.

Anyone have a more definitive story on XI?

Steve

[Kraellin]

thanks guys. just ordered the upgrade, box version. shld be here in a few days to a week. will let you know what i think.

from the web site, it looks like a lot of the new stuff is targeted directly at camera use. i looked at all the categories and saw some new editing stuff, one or two looked exciting enough for me to give this a shot. on the other hand, some of it they were saying was new, looked a lot like the old stuff. i can only hope those items were upgraded.

but, for $60 for the upgrade, it's hard to go wrong....(knock on wood ).

craig

[skydog]

I've used Paintshop from the beginning and loved every upgrade until Paintshop Pro X and reverted back to 9. Since then I took the jump into Photoshop CS2 and realized that that was a great move for me. I have ALOT to learn...but I am...day by day - especially with the help/guidance provided by those on this site!

[Steve Conway]

Keep us informed Craig.

I still have Paint Shop Pro X lying in a desk drawer, never installed.

Steve

Originally Posted by Kraellin

thanks guys. just ordered the upgrade, box version. shld be here in a few days to a week. will let you know what i think.

from the web site, it looks like a lot of the new stuff is targeted directly at camera use. i looked at all the categories and saw some new editing stuff, one or two looked exciting enough for me to give this a shot. on the other hand, some of it they were saying was new, looked a lot like the old stuff. i can only hope those items were upgraded.

but, for $60 for the upgrade, it's hard to go wrong....(knock on wood ).

craig

[Kraellin]

well, for the moment, hold onto your money. i got my copy today and installed and registered it. everything seemed to go fine. i even got the freebie download of extras from corel and all seemed fine. when i ran it for the first time i found they have a new browse/organize thing. it didnt show my normal picture folders but after fooling around a bit i found the way to add it to the browser. that worked fine but when i clicked on the first sub-folder, Paint Shop Pro xi crashed. cute.

so, i booted it back up and it now runs like tortoise in a mud pit. this was not there prior to the crash. it seems to be struggling loading the thumbnails used for browsing, with one thumb being loaded every 70 seconds or so...waaaay too slow! i tried killing the program and got 'program not responding' error and killed it off.

when i booted it up again, it was still the same way, so i killed the browse/organize thing to see if that would speed things up. no go. still running VERY slow. now, i've got a LOT of folders in that picture folder and a lot of pictures in each folder/sub-folder and it may just be choking on all of that, but for now....save your money.

needless to say i'll be contacting corel to see if this is a known bug and if there is a known fix. if that doesnt work, i'll try uninstalling and installing again. so, so far, a bit disappointing.

craig

edit: i just tried Paint Shop Pro 10 again to make sure it was ok. thankfully, the XI upgrade does not overwrite 10. it just makes a new install of XI based on X. so, X is still fine, working normally.

[Kraellin]

ok, i found this:

The first time Paint Shop Pro Photo XI is run, it may appear to be hung on updating cache files. Depending upon the system resources, it may take several minutes to load the cache files the very first time the program is run. Please allow the program to continue loading until the interface displays. Once this is done, the program should launch much faster when launching any other time.

on the corel web site. hopefully, since i have so many pictures on my drives, that this is all that it is. i'm currently running the program in the background hoping it will update all this cache information and then work ok after that. there is another knowledge base article i found on the corel site that seems somewhat related, but i'll give this other a chance first.

craig

[Steve Conway]

Hate to hear of your problems Craig. I don't think Corel knows what they want to do with Paint Shop Pro.

I still don't know why they bought it. Seems like they just wanted to eliminate the competition.

Let me know if things improve. Keeping my fingers crossed for ya'.

Steve

[Kraellin]

ok, the cache thing seems to have been the problem. i walked away from the computer for a while (over an hour) and when i came back, all was working smoothly again. so, if you have a folder or folders that have thousands of pictures, expect to spend some time letting Paint Shop Pro xi update the cache.

new features:

this will be brief for the moment. the look and feel of the interface is pretty much the same. the layout will be familiar to anyone who has 9 or 10. the old 'browse' is now replaced by the new 'organize'. the one nice thing i see with this is that you can now sort your pictures by a number of different methods, including date of the original image, date last modified and several others.

there is a new 'object replacer' tool. i tried this one out and it's basically a clone function. i found it more a novelty than truly useful but, in some circumstances, it might be the perfect 'quck clone'. i only tried it on one image in several places and it was ok, but needed help with a regular clone. one good feature about it is, you can use the 'edit selection' function with this and you'll need it. they only allowed you to select here using a freehand 'smart' selection tool and that is always a bit dicey. so, use the selection tool but follow it up with 'edit selection' and the selection works much better.

oh, and there is a second 2nd cd that comes with Paint Shop Pro xi. this is a video tutorial disk! i havent looked at it yet, but it seems to be taken from videos on lynda.com.

also with the 2 cd set comes 'snapfire se'. dont know a lot about that but it seems to be a fairly basic photo editing thing. i didnt bother to even install it.

also on the cd's is corel painter essentials 3, demo/trial version. didnt install that either.

in the 'adjusts' menu is a new menu item, 'soft focus'. there were about 3 items in the sub-menu. it's basically just what it says; it creates a soft focus on your image.

also in the 'adjusts' menu are 'depth of field' and 'skin smoothing'. havent tried the latter yet but did try the depth of field. here again you have to select an area. it's also freehand but does include circular and rectangular. this whole tool comes up a window with several adjustments for changing the blur of the background and so on. i'm also going to have to read up on this one as i'm getting an error message when i do some things. may be me and may be the program. not sure yet.

there are other things i havent tried yet and i'll be posting more as i go. so, stay tuned.

craig

[Kraellin]

i've been playing around with the new 'depth of field' filter. it's a nice idea but somewhat poorly implemented. the success of this thing falls directly to how well you can make a selection around your target that you want to keep in focus, because basically, all you're doing is keeping one area in focus while you blur the rest of the image. if you cant get the target area selected properly, the rest is never going to be as good as you want.

the problem is in the freehand selection. you have to do this in the tiny preview window and there is no point to point select; it's the true freehand selection. the window is too small and the freehand is too hard to do in that tiny window. this would work much better if you could select your target with 'edit selection' or even if you had point to point selection.

so, you're better off simply doing the entire thing without the 'depth of field' filter. just select your target, invert and blur the rest of the image. same thing. that's all this filter is, select, invert, blur.

i would have much preferred corel concentrated on making some of the basics better than putting these 'we need to do something cool' items in here, especially when they're poorly implemented.

now, i shld also mention that there is a plus to this filter. if you use the circular or rectangular select and dont blur too heavily and feather the selection out a bit (feather is a slider in this one), it can make a pretty good job of things in a hurry. so, it's not all bad. but i'd have much preferred a better selection process for all of Paint Shop Pro than this patched together select/invert/blur thing.

attached is an image i did with the freehand select in depth of field. a fairly soft blur, no feather. it's ok, but i could do this same thing much better using the basic tools of Paint Shop Pro. i did nothing else on it. you could now take a soften brush and blur the bits that didnt make it into the selection, but i think it would still be faster doing this whole thing from basic tools.

the image used is from the art forums, plum pudding thread, compliments of Peter_S

craig

[Steve Conway]

Doesn't seem like Corel is trying to do much with Paint Shop Pro that will make a person buy it instead of another graphics program in the same price range.

I think all they did when they bought it was put their name on it.

Looks also like they are shooting for the digital photographer market rather than the general photo graphics folks, hence "photo" now included in the name.

Well, let us know if you find that it will do some things you have not looked at yet.

Sorry you are the Guinea pig on this.

Steve

[skydog]

Personally, I feel, Paint Shop Pro was a great program for the money until Corel bought it. I do not think it has actually improved since Corel bought it..it has only degraded..but again for $59 it probably is still a good deal. I still recommend version 9.

[Kraellin]

ok, so far you've seen my mistakes in running Paint Shop Pro xi and one no so glowing report. so, let's not jump to the conclusion here that psp xi is all crap, all bad. it's not. the new photo effects are pretty cool. the skin smoothing filter works well. and the new image effects are also pretty good. and i've still not explored everything.

the attached image is using skin smoothing, the image effect, page curl, the new time machine and 'film and filters'. this is all Paint Shop Pro xi.

i'd recommend installing X, steve. corel may have done more than you think.
i do agree they seem to be going more towards the photo crowd.

craig

edit: oh, the original image was posted by Pavel123 in th portrait art forum and he got it off stock.xchng.com

[seekerdude]

I ordered and received the boxed version of Paint Shop Pro XI. I'm having a problem with heavy CPU usage which seems to go beyond the initial loading of the new database which has been incorporated in Paint Shop Pro XI to organize the picture files on the computer.

As I understand it from Corel, while Paint Shop Pro is creating the database, there will be heavy CPU usage after which usage levels should return to normal levels. I do not know how long Paint Shop Pro is supposed to take in creating this database and I can get no answer from Corel. But even after having Paint Shop Pro run for 4-5 hours, my CPU usage is 50%! Now, the really interesting thing is that while I am using any function within the program, the usage level DROPS to normal levels. It is only when the program is quiescent that the CPU usage is at 50%. This is the case even when the program is minimized and sitting in the task bar. Paint Shop Pro X does not have this problem. Other than this issue, Paint Shop Pro XI seems to be doing what it is supposed to do.

I was worried when Corel bought Paint Shop Pro from JASC that this would happen. I've been using Paint Shop Pro for years and never even thought of using Photoshop, but if this keeps up, a change may be in the offing. I hope Corel starts taking Paint Shop Pro seriously soon.

[Kraellin]

seekerdude, welcome to RetouchPRO.

odd. i had the heavy usage also but it went away when the database was completed. how much ram do you have in your machne? that really shldnt make a difference, though, not for getting 50% cpu use when idle and then almost 0% when active.

as for how long the database creation takes, that would be dependent on how many picture files you have on your harddrive, how many partitions and so on.

sounds like some tsr (terminate and stay resident) type part of Paint Shop Pro is active on your system...

ok, i just checked mine also. when inactive, like yours, i get 100% cpu use reported in task manager, and like you, when i run a filter or something else, it drops to 0%. sounds like a bug to me. the thing is, it doesnt ACT like it's using 100% cpu. this sounds like some sort of reporting error to me and not an actual 100% cpu thing... like it's an inverted report, backwards. i cant be absolutely sure, but it ACTS like an inversion, not an actual thing.

i'd report it to Corel and see what they say or check their faqs section and see if anyone else has reported this.

craig