Has anyone tried Paintshop Pro 11 yet?
 

I just downloaded a copy today, haven't had much of a chance to play with it yet, but first impressions say it's very similar to PSP 10, which I've had on 30-day free trial, and vastly prefer to the horribly overblown and clumsy Photoshop. Not that that's saying a great deal - on the whole, I would prefer sitting down to a nice bowl of stewed leeches to having to use Phoshop every day.

PSP 11 is still sluggish (though, of course, vastly faster than the glacial Adobe product) and I suspect it's going to be a bit buggy, which would be no surprise, Corel products nearly always are, but at least has a half sensible user interface. (Could use a lot of work still, but much better than the alternative.)

Unfortunately, it's targeted squarely at the click and giggle brigade, so many of the default settings are way overblown (too much saturation, too many cutesy tricks and effects) but that is OK: you can learn (as I am doing, very slowly) to do stuff manually, and Paintshop Pro gives you pretty much everything you need to PP a picture: levels and curves and several useful preset tools like the backlighting and fill flash ones (same as Photoshop, essentially) that quite often work effectively.

The biggest, stand-out-like-a-dog's-proverbials flaw is its inability to preserve EXIF information when saving as TIFF. Huh? WTF? I can't believe they haven't fixed that yet. Everything that's worth having can write EXIF info to a TIFF file: Photoshop, PMView, NeatImage, you name it. A small thing, but bloody annoying.

Still, it's around US$100 - i.e., a sixth the price of Photoshop and around three times as useful. Early days yet - I've only had it for a couple of hours, but at this stage I don't regret spending the money. You can download a free 30-day trial from corel.com, so take a look and see what you think.

I've been using PSP for years, starting at version 5 all the way to current version 11. You are correct that version 11 did not add all that much. It is also somewhat unstable. In contrast, version 10 was solid as a rock. As I've reported elsewhere, I spent months editing a large image, with as many as 25 or 30 layers, and PSP 10 didn't crash once during the whole time.

Unfortunately, I've had problems with version 11 crashing sometimes, and also getting scripting errors. Seeing as how version 11 isn't all that big an upgrade, I expect them to solve these problems quickly (yes, I guess I'm saying that it's good that version 11 isn't that big an upgrade!).

I've been a PSP fan since the days when it was a shareware app (wow! that dates me). I'm very happy with PSPX and I can't really see much point in upgrading to XI - especially when I hear reports of instability.

I reckon XI is the first of the 'Corelised' versions.

Actually, I'd say that X was the first. Corel purchased Jasc when version 9 was current. Then maybe 6 months later, version X was released. It had enough enhancements and differences that you could see Corel's hand in it (at least that's the way it appears to me). I was worried about it, because Corel has a little bit of a reputation for delivering products before they're ready. Anyway, they did a good job with version X.

The big difference in XI is that the Browser is now an Organizer (e.g. you can label images with keywords and then search on keywords, etc). Whether it's an improvement is open to question. It does have a few nice new tools and some improvements on existing tools.