Paintshop is Corel’s main, long-standing photo-editing software for home users.

The company also has a new, cheaper Digital Studio (at £59) which provides basic tools for editing both photos and video, but the editing tools in Paintshop Photo Pro are much more powerful.

The program works in three main modes. When it’s first launched Paintshop opens its Organiser window, which allows users to quickly preview photos and organise them by adding ratings, or keywords such as ‘sport’ or ‘holiday’ so that they can be quickly located later.

Once you have selected a photo there are two different editing modes that are activated using the buttons in the top-right corner of the Organiser window. The Express Lab button opens a new window with simple tools for adjusting settings such as brightness, contrast, and colour balance, along with a set of ‘makeover’ tools for removing skin blemishes, whitening discoloured teeth and even adding a bit of fake suntan to pale skin.

One interesting feature here is the ability to ‘capture’ the changes made to one photo so they can be applied to other photos as well. If you have a batch of dark photos that were all shot at night-time you might adjust the brightness on one, capture those settings and apply them to all the other photos in the batch – instantly editing the entire collection of photos all at once.

For more advanced editing control users can click the Full Editor button that opens up Paintshop’s full range of editing tools. This new version of Paintshop includes some powerful new features such as the Object Extractor. This makes it easier to select areas of fine detail, such as the hair on someone’s head, so that you can copy that part of the image and combine it with another image.

Another variation on this theme is the Smart Carver tool which is used to completely remove part of an image while still leaving the background of the image intact. Corel has also thrown in a copy of Painter Photo Essentials – an arty program that specialises in making your photos look like hand-painted artwork.

These new features all work well. Our only complaint is that the poor documentation provided sometimes left us a bit confused. There is a Learning Centre palette within the Full Editor window that provides tips for a number of tools, but many of the more advanced tools, such as the Smart Carver, are poorly explained even by the more complete help files found on Corel’s website.

So while Paintshop Photo Pro X3 does contain an impressive range of photo-editing tools, newcomers will need to be have a lot of patience in order to get to grips with the program.