Software Reviews

For years, anyone serious about photography has viewed Corel Paint Shop Pro (PSP) as the low cost alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Originally developed by a tiny company in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, Paint Shop has grown up into a full-featured photo workflow tool with a built-in photo organizer that includes tagging options and fast previewing, an advanced image editor, and handy integration with Flickr and Facebook.

For $70, PaintShop Photo Pro X3 Ultimate is a smart addition to a virtual photo toolbox. A few performance problems and some slightly questionable editing capabilities puts PSP in the uncomfortable position of still being in the tall shadow of Adobe. That said, if you want to skip the $700 purchase price, PSP is on the right track.

The idea of loading an image and pushing a button and seeing what happens may be anathema to some photographers, but for certain images where you might want an extra-special touch done easy it might just do the trick.

Sometimes a straight photograph isn’t the goal when we capture images. Thanks to a number of programs, you can take your photograph beyond the ordinary and turn it into a work of art with a few clicks of the mouse. One such program is Topaz Simplify (www.topazlabs.com, $39.99). Running standalone or as a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture, Simplify has a number of presets ranging from cartoon look to wood carvings to help you get started. Additionally, if you create your own look, you can save it as a preset and share those presets with other users.

DxO Optics Pro Version 7 is a Raw converter for Mac and Microsoft Windows with some nifty tricks up its sleeve. It offers its own brand of nondestructive image editing, with tonal, exposure, geometric, and optical corrections that make it stand apart from the crowd. As was true of Version 6.6, Optics Pro 7 supports the company’s new FilmPack 3 film emulator plug-in (see sidebar below). We will have a more complete review of the film emulator in a future issue.

Optics Pro Version 7 is a dramatic departure from earlier releases. The Select pane is gone, so you no longer have to deal with tedious Projects (unless you want to). Now you go straight to work after opening a folder. Double-click on an image and that takes you right to the nondestructive editing phase, in Customize. Beyond this point the Mac and Windows versions part ways in one key respect: the Windows version runs faster than the Mac version, which continues to be laborious.

DxO just released PhotoLab 4, a major update of their innovative photo-editing software. This latest version features DxO DeepPRIME, a game-changing technology you’re going to be hearing about over and over from now on. DxO DeepPRIME is a groundbreaking demosaicing and denoising engine based on artificial intelligence and trained with deep learning. And I'm not kidding when I say it will make old Raw files from your 10+ years old camera look like they were shot with the best and latest camera model on the market.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could resize a batch of images simply by right-clicking them and selecting their new dimensions from a menu? Windows users now can—even on 64-bit machines running Windows 8.1.

I have been using Epson’s Advanced B&W Photo printing mode for many years in a series of the company’s desktop printers but always wished the print software offered a way to see my image adjustments in real time. So, when Epson announced their new Print Layout software, which offers a “live preview” (among other controls) in Advanced B&W Photo mode, I contacted them to give it a whirl.