Corel's PaintShop Pro X6 is a very helpful photo editing tool for photo enthusiasts, serious shooters, and even pros. Adobe Photoshop CS is the only photo editing tool worthy of consideration for most professionals but for everyone in the middle like pros or photo enthusiasts who are dissatisfied with Adobe's new Creative Cloud—there's Corel's PaintShop Pro. PaintShop Pro offers 90 percent of Adobe's features for a tenth the price and it is definitely a viable Photoshop alternative for 20 years. PaintShop Pro X6 is all about improved performance and this upgrade offers few exceptions which are appreciable. PaintShop Pro is a 64-bit application and it is has the capability to work with larger and more numerous images. It has also has faster processing abilities. In order to show that X6 runs faster than its predecessors, Corel offers a slew of benchmarks and it runs notably quicker. X6 shaves a few seconds off the startup time. Both JPG and RAW images load about 10 percent faster and X6 catalogs folders and displays images more than twice as fast. It gives you the impression that you are at the helm of a tightly run ship. Efficient design second to displaying lots and lots of tools is brought by PaintShop Pro's relatively unchanged interface. Managing, Adjusting, and Editing are the three workspaces via tabs at the top of the screen. You can enter ratings and keywords in the Manage workspace and it is like a light box made. You can also review metadata and inspect photos. It is all highly configurable even though this view is perhaps the most crowded and confusing. You can turn toolbars, panes and palettes off and rearrange things to your liking.

You can enter ratings and keywords in the Manage workspace and it is like a light box made. You can also review metadata and inspect photos. It is all highly configurable even though this view is perhaps the most crowded and confusing. You can turn toolbars, panes and palettes off and rearrange things to your liking. The Manage view can be entirely avoided and the program and the program do not force you to import photos into a proprietary library if you like. You can always navigate through existing folders. If you don't use Corel's "collections," though, you're missing out. They let you tag photos for easier retrieval, and they load more quickly as well. They also give you access to a face recognition mode, but it's perhaps more trouble than it's worth. Among other difficulties, browsing photos by people is difficult because you see tightly cropped faces only, not the entire image. Head over to the Adjust workspace for a fast and lightweight editor. Corel deems useful for lightweight editing and as go-to tools for novices and it houses about a dozen common tools. You have to access Smart Photo Fix, white balance, fill light, and others from a textual list below even though some tools, such as cropping, red eye, and straightening appear in toolbar form under the histogram. There's no apparent rhyme or reason for why it's organized this way. The region where PaintShop Pro and Photoshop closely resemble is the Editing workspace. It's chock-full of layer support, selection tools, levels and curves controls, and even the ability to use industry standard Adobe Photoshop plug-ins. PaintShop Pro doesn't deliver on relatively few "big ideas. It can split one RAW image into three, and then reassemble them into an HDR shot and besides this the program include a very serviceable High Dynamic Range feature for combining a series of photos shot with a range of exposures. The effect can be convincing with the right source material although the effect is not nearly as good as a true HDR.

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