by Ms. Marie

Created on: April 08, 2010

The decision to purchase Corel's Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 was easy after researching other programs.  The price and features made it a wise choice, and it's a decision that I am glad that I made.  There are many free photo editing programs that can adjust brightness and contrast, remove red eye, add frames, and crop photos.  However, being creative takes a little more than the basics when it comes to digital photos, and graphic art.

Paint Shop Pro X2 gives you the tools you need to really "edit" photos, or create art from scratch.  It is simple enough for novice users to become familiar with, so fixing red eye or making a dark photo light is fairly easy.  Intermediate users can create more than a dozen layers, remove backgrounds, blend layers, create mask and save them, deform images using the mesh tool, remove unwanted objects with ease, clone areas of a picture to achieve quick touch ups, and much more.

But it is also powerful enough for advanced users to push their creativity to the limit.  Paint Shop Pro has the sought after Pen Tool that any advanced user must have.  You can make precise selections, and save your paths.  Creating line art using the pen tool is a favorite for those who enjoy turning a digital photo into an avatar, cartoon, or outlines that can be saved and used over and over again.

Graphic artist use the pen tool when they need to isolate a subject over-white, but want to save the path.  PSP X2's text tool is versatile, you can create vector text, floating text, or selection text, and depending on which type you choose you can add awsome effects to design perfect logos, website banners, and much more.

Scrapbookers can add frames, text, tubes, gradient backgrounds, textures, and everything they need to bring their storybook to life.  This is a photo editing program that is worth every penny.  If you are new to editing digital photos take your time, and learn how to use the different tools.  There is plenty of help available because the program has a learning center, and if that's not enough the Internet has a lot of easy to understand tutorials, and videos. 

Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 is packed with everything one needs to handle any photo editing task.  There are many more tools available,  too many to mention here, and because it is a very flexible and stable program made by a company with an excellent reputation I'd recommend it to any beginner or advanced user. 

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