Buy Paint Shop Pro
Extend the power of PaintShop Pro with 64-bit third-party plugins including Adobe plugins or brushes, Topaz Labs, Nik Collection by DXO and so many more. Import PSD files and export to Photoshop to work effortlessly across platforms.
buy paint shop pro
Enjoy fun and uncomplicated painting software for beginners that will inspire you to experiment and fall in love with digital painting. Sketch, draw and paint away on a blank canvas using realistic brushes or dabble in exclusive image-based AI and cloning art. Enjoy a newly added extra brush pack.
The 2022 version of Paintshop Pro is packed with new features, some of which are powered by machine learning AI. The Frame tool allows quick masking of raster images to fit in specific shapes, great for graphic design work. AI Background Replacement intelligently scans photos to cut out subjects automatically, allowing replacement backgrounds to be added with no manual cuts. The AI Portrait mode works in a similar way by placing a bokeh blur effect on portraits to make it look like images were shot with a shallow depth of field. The new AI Style Transfer takes the style from a piece of art and effects photos to mimic this look.
For those needing a little bit more, the Paintshop Pro store offers downloads (both free and paid-for) that encompass plug-ins, applications, scripts, brushes, and more to help expand content creation and keep work fresh.
With Corel Paintshop Pro 2022, you can either make a new project from scratch, use one of the many pre-designed templates to build upon, or simply open an existing project to get started. Templates are helpful for users who need to create designs for flyers or online content, as they provide a launchpad of graphics from which to create bespoke work for publication.
Unfortunately, Corel Paintshop Pro 2022 only works with Windows 10, recommended version 1903 or later with the latest service pack (64-bit editions). However, it is possible to run it on Windows-powered portable devices such as Microsoft Surface tablets as the application can be downloaded via the Microsoft Store.
Corel Paintshop Pro 2022 runs only on Windows 10 (recommended version 1903 or later with the latest service pack for 64-bit editions) and requires an internet connection to access tutorials and download extra content via the store.
Corel Paintshop Pro 2022 is $79.99 or $99.99 for the Ultimate edition, which includes many more application features such as Painter Essentials 8 and the Sea-to-Sky workspace, as well as the option to use Multicam Capture Lite to create videos and screen recordings, to name but three. Once you buy it, you own it, but future upgrades do come at a cost.
The one-time purchase options are a good fit for those who still resent Adobe's move to a subscription-only model for Photoshop, Lightroom, and Illustrator. For $9.99 per month, you get both Photoshop and Lightroom, but Illustrator starts at $19.99 per month if you prepay for a year. Photoshop Elements ($99), Adobe's consumer-level photo editing software, requires no subscription, but that software has more of a hobbyist feel, as opposed to the company's pro-level offerings.
Unlike in Adobe Photoshop Elements, which has a separate Organizer app, you do everything in PaintShop in the same window, but you switch between the Welcome, Manage, and Edit modes for different functions. Switching between these modes, however, isn't always instantaneous; performance here could stand improvement.
You can also save in Adobe PSD format (though you lose vector layers and other features), along with dozens of other standard image formats. If you open a PSD file created in Photoshop, layers are preserved, and you can edit them separately to taste. Afterward, your edits are fully editable if you open the resulting PSD in Photoshop. That means if you're working with someone who uses Photoshop, you're able to edit compatibly in PaintShop, but if you start in PaintShop, they only see a flattened version of your file.
By comparison, in Photoshop you must open raw files in Adobe Camera Raw utility before editing, though that tool itself offers a good many editing options. Corel's AfterShot option opens a whole new app, offering lighting, color, lens, noise, and geometry corrections, as well as the nifty Perfectly Clear tool, sort of like Lightroom's Clarity slider. For more on that option, read my AfterShot Pro review. In testing, PaintShop was able to open recent raw formats such as CR3 and raw files from a Canon EOS R7, a Fujifilm X-T4, a Nikon Z fc, and a Sony α7R IV.
Another gap is the lack of control over the effects. Sometimes you want to tone it down a bit, as I found with the Instant Film effect. Photoshop Elements' instant effects are indeed adjustable, but PaintShop's aren't.
The most commonly used photo editing tool by far is the crop tool. It may seem that there's nothing to it, but Adobe supercharged Photoshop's crop tool, even adding AI-powered auto-suggested cropping (now also found in Photoshop Elements). Corel continues to give attention to its own crop tool, too. It gives you a better idea of your final result by darkening the rest of the image. It offers overlays for composition guides, including golden spiral, golden ratio, and rule of thirds. When you rotate with the tool, the crop box stays put while the image rotates, so you can see the result without tilting your head.
These overlays are more than Adobe Photoshop Elements offers (it lacks the golden spiral, for example), and that program rotates the crop box instead of the image. But Elements adds some cool-cookie cutter crops like hearts and animal shapes, and Adobe's cropping tools generally feel more responsive and precisely controllable than Corel's.
Replacing a photo's background used to be a many-step, hit-or-miss process in Photoshop. That program, and now PaintShop have both flipped the script on that scenario, making it a one-click affair. The AI Background Replacement tool in PaintShop works with human subjects, while Photoshop and Skylum Luminar now have tools for changing background skies in landscapes, too. The latter is still missing in PaintShop.
AI Background replacement is not unlike using Photoshop's Subject Select tool, which instantly isolates and masks a human (or even nonhuman) subject in your photo and lets you put whatever you want in the background layer. PaintShop does simplify the process, however, offering preset backgrounds.
I was expecting AI face manipulation tools like those in ON1 and Photoshop, but the AI Portrait Mode is really just for selecting a subject and adding background blur. It works much like the iPhone's Portrait mode. The quality of the result depends on the accuracy of the selection. The selection wasn't perfect for my test shot, but luckily you can tweak it. Since the effect is simulating lens bokeh, it's interesting that you can choose between round and hexagonal apertures. I found that using the latter with less feathering worked best.
We've all had to deal with an image that was just too small or low-resolution for the purpose at hand. The AI Upsampling tool does a remarkable job of removing that blocky effect when you enlarge such photos. The left side in the image above shows those blocky artifacts, while the right side uses Corel's AI Upsampling tool to produce a pleasing, smooth result. The tool offers denoising at the same time, but I was able to get this result without using any. Photoshop offers several sampling options for enlargement, but when I used them on the same image, none of them produced a result as good as this one. They all still showed blockiness and artifact distortion.
AI Style Transfer is an effect that an earlier version of PaintShop called Pic-to-Painting. These effects resemble the Prisma-app craze of a few years ago and have appeared in many photo apps, notably the competing CyberLink PhotoDirector. They use AI technology to generate art from your photos resembling that of specific painters, such as Picasso or Van Gogh.
Corel includes a good selection of painterly and artistic effects by default, while CyberLink requires extra downloading and charges extra for some of the effects. You can use a slider to adjust the strength of the effect, for a degree of customization. The Photography interface lets you use the split before-and-after view, seen above.
A new related tool is Focus Stacking. It lets you combine photos taken at different focus points to make the whole image sharp. You can get to Focus Stacking from Edit > File > Focus stacking or by right-clicking on multiple photo thumbnails in Manage view and choosing it. You can paint on and erase off areas that you want to keep and remove in the final image, and then you click Blend. When it finishes, you can open the resulting combined image.
Once you move into Edit mode, the full assortment of tools comes into play. Just as in Photoshop, you can add layers, manipulate grouped objects, and adjust curves and levels. Layers are much better done than in ON1 Photo Raw, with a more Photoshop-like, clear view of each layer in an optional panel. You can create Vector, Raster, Art Media, Mask, and Adjustment layer types, with all the blending modes you'd expect. An update means that you'll now see the effect of changing the blend mode from, say, Normal to Luminance. It only worked in the right-side Layer panel, though, not in the Layer Properties dialog.
Two selection tools, Smart Selection and Auto Selection, are similar to Photoshop's magic wand. The first did a decent job of letting me brush to create an edge-detected selection. But the Auto Selection is more impressive. You draw a box, and the tool selects an object inside it. In my testing, it only worked with very uniform backgrounds (a clear sky, for example) and objects with well-defined edges. Still, it's a useful tool for plucking a head off and using it against a different background. In the right circumstances, it works quite well. 041b061a72