The Project Creator is an extremely simplified user interface that lets you create photo books, collages, photo calendars and more with a few simple clicks.
I found the vibrancy tool to be the perfect fix for under-saturated skin tones in my high ISO shots.
This tool is extremely useful for high ISO images that usually suffer from reduced color saturation as a trade off for improved low-light sensitivity. This improved color saturation tool lets you boost color in the least saturated areas of a photo without affecting the rest of the image. There are undoubtedly situations where this tool will be useful, but I suspect the smart carver tool won’t be commonly used by most consumers. You can easily select the area or object that you want to remove from your image, but when you actually “carve” out that section of the photo the remaining image clearly looks as if something was removed. In practice, the Smart Carver tool isn’t as smart as it could be.
This brand new feature promises to “seamlessly remove objects from an image with professional quality.” Smart Carver is essentially a modified version of the standard object remover tool previously seen in Paint Shop but it’s also supposed to let you expand or contract objects without distortion. So, if you “need” a variety of controls when editing RAW images then X3 may not be the best program for you to use at this time. The lack of cropping tools, highlight recovery, or independent color channel adjustments might be frustrating to some users. You can adjust exposure, brightness, saturation, shadows, sharpness, white balance and noise reduction, but the level of control isn’t as in depth as what is offered with Adobe’s RAW editor. Unfortunately, the RAW image editor built into X3 is once again not as functional as it could be.
I tested the new RAW Lab with RAW files from multiple Nikon and Pentax cameras and the software opened the RAW files without any problems. X3 supports a wide range of RAW image formats used my most digital cameras. Unlike compressed image formats like JPEG, RAW images record more color, greater dynamic range (more shadow detail and more highlight detail), and allow you to easily change the white balance during post-processing in case you used the wrong white balance when you took the photo. Adobe Camera RAW is one of the main reasons I use Photoshop, so if Corel’s RAW Lab works as advertised I might have a reason to switch. When I heard that Corel included a new RAW Lab feature in X3, I was eager to give it a try. One of my chief complaints about the previous version of Paint Shop was the complete uselessness of the limited RAW editor. All the other common tools such as crop, rotate, red-eye removal, makeover/blemish removal, brightness, saturation, and other quick fix tools are still available inside this interface. New features include adjusting color balance (white balance correction), local tone mapping (increasing the dynamic range in part of your photo), a new sharpen tool that lets you selectively sharpen parts of the image, and one step noise removal that removes random color noise and artifacts from your images. This streamlined editing mode was first introduced in Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 to help photographers edit multiple photos at the same time, but Corel added a few new features to the mix in Paint Shop Photo Pro X3. You can view images in a variety of ways, tag photos with keywords, rate photos so you can sort them according to quality, you can view the EXIF data, convert RAW images to another file format, and even apply basic edits to multiple images using the Express Lab. Think of the Organizer like a hybrid of Adobe Lightroom and Microsoft Picture Manager. The new Organizer interface is the first thing you’ll see when using X3 and it’s a very intuitive image management tool.