Corel Paint Shop Pro X2

I discovered Corel’s Paint Shop Pro XI at Future Shop late last year. I did not buy it right away because I had no projects that required such a powerful and yet economic software tool at the moment. More research on the tool led me to the conclusion that it would be replaced by a newer version soon. That time has come last week! Corel released Paint Shop Pro X2 on September 5^th. The new version can be installed on Windows XP and Windows Vista. The price is the same as the previous version. That is to say at a price of CAD$99, you possess the ability of changing the colour of your finished or unfinished model at will. (Believe it or not, the price in the US currency is also US$99; this is a moment when I am glad to be a Canadian

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I always want to have this colour changing feature because it makes life much easier to test the colour of an unpainted model before painting. However this capability was always bundled with some high-end professional software packages like Corel Draw or Adobe Photoshop. Unfortunately they are painfully expensive for casual users. To the best of my knowledge, Paint Shop Pro is the only “cheap” software tool that comes with this feature, in addition to other nice capabilities.

This is why I spent sometime last night to download the software. I will have a month to test the tool. By the end of it, I bet I can find it from many stores in Ottawa. The download was a little bit bumpy but it was completely finished at the end. I guess the problem comes from the fact that Windows Vista and Internet Explorer are too cautious about software download. Installation is generally okay but I had trouble in starting the tool for the first time. The software took ages to start and never finished the initialization process. I end up force-quitted the program and restarted the computer. For some unknown reasons, the software installer did not prompt for restarting the computer at the last stage of installation. This is usually needed after installing a big software package. After the restart, I could use the Paint Shop without any problem; this is something fellow users need to know during the installation process. (In case somebody wants to know, I am running Windows Vista Home Premium on an Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4GHz CPU with 2G RAM. Hardware should contribute little on the installation problem.)

Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 

Example:

 Original

 Colour-changed version

(This blog entry is written in English because I do not know most of the jargons in Chinese; and I hate writing in Chinese with English terms pop up everywhere.)