Showing the effect the recent cash injection into the company has had, Corel has made a somewhat noisy launch of PaintShop Pro 2020, including releasing a large number of videos explaining or demonstrating various new features.
Overall, the emphasis seems to be mostly on speed, no matter what they may be trying to sell this as.
Refine Brush is a feature essentially copied from standalone apps such as CutOut. They’re putting it up against some hard challenges in this video, and it predictably fails:
Similarly, the new SmartClone tool pales extremely in comparison with Affinity Photo’s content aware paint, and looks like a bit of a joke compared to the quality of automatic retouching that we’re used to seeing.
Overall, there is a sense that they are overselling this release hard, not to mention that the website seems to be strongly modelled on Affinity’s. At the price they’re trying to get for this, they would need to be at least as good as Affinity in basic tasks like content aware fill, and they quite surprisingly do not have that down.
They also list “artificial intelligence” among the features that it’s “hard to list”. Inquiring minds would have liked to know, though. It does not seem that the items listed under “intelligent solutions” require AI.
The strongest part of the package is probably the ability to install third party software through a plugin store. The philosophy here seems to be that most things that used to be included are now sold as individual scripts costing $9.99 – a “soft dream” script would be as much an example as “antique painting”, “duotone”, or “high contrast black and white”, all priced at $9.99. These are basic filters most raster graphics applications would have included in the sale price. The Photo Filter Bundle has an undefined set of these for the normal listed price of $130. Either way, I suspect that either Photoshop CS6 or Elements would be a better buy by the time you’ve filled in the gaps with in-app purchases.
Given what individual apps cost on the macOS store, it’s clear that the current pricing for these things on Corel’s store needs to be cut by about 90%.
Half a year after the Parallels acquisition, there is no Mac support for PaintShop Pro yet, and it should of course reasonably be expected to take more time. However, it would be nice to see Corel compete on a broader basis.
I look forward to them bringing this particular puppy out of the 80s, but this feels like a rushed release with some lessons left to be learned, perhaps on the part of the new owners. Potential customers with no special attachment to this franchise had better wait for the 2021 flavour.
breakfastographer 