Well, I finally upgraded to PSP9, the latest and greatest photo and image editing software from Corel. Pretty much had to. I've had it on my system for a couple of days now and I've got to say -- this software ROCKS! (OK, not so much vernacular).
If you have a digital camera, you will love this software. Or maybe even if you don't. I'm usually impressed by PSP's new filters, but they've outdone themselves this time.
The most interesting and immediately useful filter I found was "Fill Flash." Let's say you took a photo of someone who was standing in front of a lit window. Now you have a lovely silhouette but not much detail of the person. PSP's fill flash function will clear that up. It is super - cleans up the person without washing out any of the other photo detail and it has a lovely color value to it.
Two very interesting new filters are the chromatic and noise fixes for digital photos. Most digital cameras create chromatic distortions around the edges of objects, which the chromatic filter neatly removes. And many cameras leave 'noise' in the photo -- bits of color variation that are not true to life. The noise filter removes those beautifully without losing any of the image detail. I'm still running with a 4.0 megapixel camera and these two filters give me a much cleaner image -- one that looks like it might have come from a pro camera.
I also was very impressed by the new scripts. In PSP 8, you could do things like Charcoal, Oil Painting and so on, but they were very simple filters. In PSP 9, those same filters are there, but with an added layer of scripting that does a much better job of converting photos to art projects.
This added to PSP's unique and really useful red eye feature, clarify, unsharp mask and all the other really good photo tools make it #1 in my book -- why would anyone pay a couple hundred dollars for the full-fledged version of Photoshop when PSP is available for only $59? (OK, now I sound like an infomercial)
But true. Pick it up if you can and enjoy...