[Tannin]

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.