Corel PaintShop Pro X5 Ultimate review

It’s impossible to review PaintShop Pro without comparing it to Photoshop Elements. They’re very similar in many respects but we’ve always found Corel’s editor to be a little awkward and slow compared to its arch rival. It comes top for advanced features, though, with CMYK separations and 16-bit colour support aligning it closer to Photoshop CS6 than Elements. However, now that Photoshop Elements supports layer masks, these differences aren’t so significant for home users.

The Manage mode is home to the best new tricks. It can now tag faces, and uses a combination of face recognition and names downloaded from Facebook to speed things up. Facebook uploads have tags that are linked through to friends’ profiles. It didn’t let us tag ourselves in photos, though. Face detection seemed accurate but the process of going through to confirm or correct tags was more time-consuming than in Picasa or Photoshop Elements. It was easier to let the software locate faces and then for us to name them manually by dragging the thumbnails on the People tags.

Photos can be browsed on a map or via a directory of location names from country to street level

The Manage tab also adds mapping, and it’s the best implementation we’ve seen to date. Geo-tagged photos can be browsed on a map, but it’s also possible to browse them using location name tags, arranged as a tree view structure. Clicking a tag reveals all photos taken in a particular country, region, town or street, either on the map or as a selection of thumbnails.

Share My Trip publishes interactive maps, complete with Street View

Comprehensive text searches of anything from postcodes to landmarks help to find locations for manually geo-tagging, and Street View images help pinpoint a location. A Share My Trip function uploads an interactive map to Dropbox and posts a link to Facebook.

The Manage and Adjust tabs gain a new panel called Instant Effects. These are applied with a double click and, true to their name, there are no settings to concern yourself with.

Quality is a little patchy but there’s no shortage of templates, and they’re well organised to guide you to your favourites. However, we don’t like how the original files are overwritten without warning in Manage mode. The original file is stowed in a hidden folder and retrieved via a Revert button, but after closing and restarting the software, it appeared to have lost track of the original.

The Edit tab’s new Retro Lab effect requires a bit of effort to get the most out of, but we appreciate the advanced level of control that it offers.

Retro Lab takes vintage photo effects back to first principles

Meanwhile, the Graduated Filter effect emulates the role of a graduated neutral-density filter for darkening skies in landscape photos. It’s a shame it can’t be used directly on raw image data to recover clipped highlights. The Ultimate version also includes Nik Color Efex Pro 3, a superb effects plug-in from the maker of Snapseed that’s packed with stylish presets and a decent amount of control.

Color Efex Pro 3 ups the ante for stylish, sophisticated photo filters

HDR processing can now work with multiple or single raw files. However, this feature reminded us of the things we don’t like about PaintShop Pro. It’s broken down into three discrete stages for no obvious benefit to the user. Processing was painfully slow, with preview updates taking up to ten seconds to appear. For some reason we weren’t allowed to view the image parameters and use the Pan Tool (for inspecting different parts of the image) at the same time – selecting one made the other disappear.