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It’s Adobe’s Creative Cloud TITSUP birthday. Ease the pain with its RGB-wrangling rivals

Alternatives to pixel-poking behemoth Photoshop

Anything but Photoshop: The competition

Join me below for a quick tour of the top contenders. Spoiler: after 25 years, Adobe still has no direct competition. The Windows workhorses are good value for money, but to the experienced hand they still lack Photoshop’s robust finesse, and they have yet to emulate esoterica such as the ability to create, import, manipulate and even print 3D models. I’m picky, though: for many purposes they’re very capable.

Elsewhere, you get varying takes on the basic tonal corrections, limited selection and repair options, and user interfaces that focus on making the basics more usable rather than expanding technical or creative scope.

Corel PaintShop Pro X7

RH Numbers

PaintShop Pro comes as a 300MB download; you can get it cheaper (around £34) if you shop around for the boxed DVD. The Ultimate edition (£63.99, or £47 boxed from dealers) adds Authentic Perfectly Clear one-click image enhancement and Reallusion FaceFilter3 retouch tools.

You can opt to install a 32-bit or 64-bit version, or both. The latter is faster and can use more than 4GB of RAM, but if you have 32-bit Windows, or 32-bit plug-ins, you’ll need to stick to the 32-bit app. Photoshop plug-ins are supported, although not all will be compatible.

Corel PaintShop Pro X7

PaintShop Pro’s Learning Centre palette (right) is intended to help new users, but makes the Edit interface even more dense with content. You’ll soon learn which bits you can safely put away – click for a larger image

The modern dark grey user interface offers three modes: Manage, Adjust and Edit. The Adjust mode confused the heck out of me; eventually I realised the only way to open an image in it is to browse that image’s folder first in Manage, rather than using File > Open.

The Manage mode, duplicated in miniature in Adjust’s Organizer pane, can handle raw/JPEG pairs if you shoot that way, but when you actually open a raw image it appears in something called Camera RAW Lab, which is so primitive you’d be better off with JPEG.

Corel PaintShop Pro X7

The Adjust mode offers a different approach to editing, more like the tool set of Lightroom plus an array of fancy filters that you can apply with one click – click for a larger image

The Edit mode is the Photoshop bit. Selections are aided by a choice of Smart Edge and Edge Seeker options for the Lasso tool plus a Smart Selection tool similar to Photoshop’s Quick Select, or an Object Extractor module lets you define an area to cut out. These tools aren’t bad, but Smart Selection consistently froze in testing under Windows 8, a problem reported by users months ago that apparently hasn’t been fixed.

Magic Fill and Smart Carver help with object removal. The Warp Brush is handier than Photoshop’s Liquify module, since it works within the main UI, quickly and smoothly, and there are manual barrel, pincushion and fisheye corrections.

Corel PaintShop Pro X7

The photo browser, Manage, provides comprehensive rating and tagging facilities, again rivalling the likes of Lightroom – click for a larger image

16-bit colour is supported, but all editing is in RGB, with no Channels palette, although you can split an image into separate greyscale files for the CMYK plates, or save CMYK TIFFs.

Layer support is fair, with grouping and adjustment layers. This latest version finally gains the ability, via Text and Shape Cutters, to use a vector shape as a layer mask, but the way masks are handled is clunky and clipping paths stored in image files are ignored.

Corel PaintShop Pro X7

PaintShop Pro is let down by its primitive raw processing – if you’re bothering to shoot raw, you’ll want better tools than this to get the most out of your pictures – click for a larger image

Macro scripting and batch processing are supported, and the overall range of features is excellent – although that means the app, or at least the Edit mode, is as off-putting as Photoshop.

For an app that’s accreted features over many years, PaintShop Pro X7 feels acceptably fresh as well as comprehensive. At around £60, plus £40 for each annual upgrade if you want it, it’s less than half the price of Photoshop – but as someone who uses Photoshop for paid work, I wouldn’t switch.

Price £60
More info Corel
Next page: Serif PhotoPlus X7

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