Corel Photo-Paint 10 Review

Corel Photo-Paint 10 Review

"Offers A Broad Range of Bitmap Power"

Corel Photo-Paint 10 New and Enhanced Features:

Interactive Tools: create sophisticated effects with innovative tools, such as Interactive Drop Shadow, which are re-engineered to be more powerful and easier to use (Enhanced);

Photo Effects: new ways to manipulate photographs (New);

Text-on-a-Path: join text to any path, leaving both the text and path editable (New);

Anti-Aliasing: create designs with better quality text, especially at small point sizes and low resolutions (New);

Live Effects: edit images as often as necessary to get the right look--without starting from scratch.

Mask Effects: masks can be moved more freely within a document (Enhanced);

Channel Mixer: gives you a higher level of control over color balance by offering options to blend color channels by percentages (New).

Interactive Tools

The Interactive Drop Shadow tool in Corel Photo-Paint has been made more consistent with the Interactive Drop Shadow tool in CorelDraw 10. The tool contains new color and update features, and you have more control over the opacity and feathering of a drop shadow by using the Shadow Feathering and Shadow Opacity controls. See image to right for view of a drop shadow.

Photo Effects

You can edit photos with a single click to accomplish a variety of effects, such as Red Eye Removal, which replaces the red eye in a photograph with a user-selected color. Other new effects include Smart Blur, which lets you blur images with precise control. The feature lets you create images with sharp edges and blurred contents, and gives you more control over the degree to which images are blurred. The image to the left shows the Red Eye dialog box.

Text-on-a-Path & Anti-Aliasing

Included in Corel Photo-Paint 10, are new text features and popular features from CorelDraw. For instance, the Text-on-a-Path tool lets you bind text to a path, leaving both the path and the original text editable. Text can now be edited after transformations such as scaling, skewing, and rotating, without losing these effects. Plus text features now refresh automatically, so that any text that has transformations applied to it will be redrawn crisply. The anti-aliasing tools also have been expanded to give you better quality text, especially at small point sizes. The image to the right shows an example of text on a path.

Mask Effects

The mask features in Corel Photo-Paint 10 have been enhanced. The shape properties of the masks have been adapted so that masks can be moved more freely within a document which means masks will no longer automatically clip as soon as they are moved out of the document space. Masks can also be dragged and dropped between open documents, saving you valuable time. See image to right for view of how masks can make an interesting graphic.

Channel Mixer

There is a new Channel Mixer that gives you a higher level of control over color balance by offering options to blend color channels by percentages. The image to the right shows a view of the Channel Mixer.

Photo-Paint is a well-rounded image editor. It includes all of the basic editing features that a user would need and features more than 50 artistic brushes and customizable effects. It doesn't include all of the bells and whistles that Adobe Photoshop 6.0 has to offer, but then Photoshop is harder to learn and not every project demands that complexity. Photo-Paint has matured nicely over the years.

Web Page Editor: Macromedia Dreamweaver 4.0
Graphics: CorelDRAW Suite 10

Corel Photo-Paint 10 Review "Offers A Broad Range of Bitmap Power"

Corel Photo-Paint 10 New and Enhanced Features: Interactive Tools: create sophisticated effects with innovative tools, such as Interactive Drop Shadow, which are re-engineered to be more powerful and easier to use (Enhanced); Photo Effects: new ways to manipulate photographs (New); Text-on-a-Path: join text to any path, leaving both the text and path editable (New); Anti-Aliasing: create designs with better quality text, especially at small point sizes and low resolutions (New); Live Effects: edit images as often as necessary to get the right look--without starting from scratch. Mask Effects: masks can be moved more freely within a document (Enhanced); Channel Mixer: gives you a higher level of control over color balance by offering options to blend color channels by percentages (New).



Interactive Tools
The Interactive Drop Shadow tool in Corel Photo-Paint has been made more consistent with the Interactive Drop Shadow tool in CorelDraw 10. The tool contains new color and update features, and you have more control over the opacity and feathering of a drop shadow by using the Shadow Feathering and Shadow Opacity controls. See image to right for view of a drop shadow.

Photo Effects
You can edit photos with a single click to accomplish a variety of effects, such as Red Eye Removal, which replaces the red eye in a photograph with a user-selected color. Other new effects include Smart Blur, which lets you blur images with precise control. The feature lets you create images with sharp edges and blurred contents, and gives you more control over the degree to which images are blurred. The image to the left shows the Red Eye dialog box.

Text-on-a-Path & Anti-Aliasing
Included in Corel Photo-Paint 10, are new text features and popular features from CorelDraw. For instance, the Text-on-a-Path tool lets you bind text to a path, leaving both the path and the original text editable. Text can now be edited after transformations such as scaling, skewing, and rotating, without losing these effects. Plus text features now refresh automatically, so that any text that has transformations applied to it will be redrawn crisply. The anti-aliasing tools also have been expanded to give you better quality text, especially at small point sizes. The image to the right shows an example of text on a path.

Mask Effects
The mask features in Corel Photo-Paint 10 have been enhanced. The shape properties of the masks have been adapted so that masks can be moved more freely within a document which means masks will no longer automatically clip as soon as they are moved out of the document space. Masks can also be dragged and dropped between open documents, saving you valuable time. See image to right for view of how masks can make an interesting graphic.

Channel Mixer
There is a new Channel Mixer that gives you a higher level of control over color balance by offering options to blend color channels by percentages. The image to the right shows a view of the Channel Mixer.



Photo-Paint is a well-rounded image editor. It includes all of the basic editing features that a user would need and features more than 50 artistic brushes and customizable effects. It doesn't include all of the bells and whistles that Adobe Photoshop 6.0 has to offer, but then Photoshop is harder to learn and not every project demands that complexity. Photo-Paint has matured nicely over the years.


Web Page Editor: Macromedia Dreamweaver 4.0 Graphics: CorelDRAW Suite 10