A fun experience, excellent software

I am not an artist, not computer savvy and used this product with a mouse. And even with all those disclaimers I can tell you it was not easy to use until I read the booklet and watched the tutorial. So I suggest you watch the tutorial videos that come with it first. After a little practice I was able to produce"paintings" from photos as it promised. This lets you upload a photo and basically paint over it. And expect to be able to improve as I learn more about all that the software has to offer and of course 'Practice'. I cannot imagine how easy and useful this product would be with a tablet.

As you may be able to tell from this review, I mainly wanted this so that I could enhance my photographs. The Photo Painting was quite nice. When you upload an image all you do is select which parts of it you want shown by using the same variety of paint tools available in the Drawing & Painting workspace. And there are a lot of choices; many that I am not using at the moment, but will with time. You are even able to change the texture of the image by changing the paper; you can change the brush type and width, and even use different kinds of paints. It will take more time to learn all that this software is capable of.

For me this is a big upgrade. I have only used PC Paint before and always found myself frustrated by not having a brush size I wanted to use. Painter Essentials 4 gives you many more options and has greatly reduced this level of frustration I use to feel. Another big plus in my opinion is the undo or unedited, whichever term you are use too, works for many levels. I had gone forward and noticed something I did not like. I was able to remove the last 18 modifications I had made to the painting and it looked as if I could have kept removing them.

My sister visited me and is great a sketching. She loved the charcoal brushes range from pencils to hard or soft charcoal sticks. She mentioned that it was not as easy as drawing with the actual stick, but the sketch looked great. And I am sure with a pen attached and practice it would be just as easy.

I remember when a friend bought the first Corel product and was happy with it. I could never figure out how to use it and it was over three times the cost of this. This is worth the price, has many features and gives you an intro to the basics with its tutorial material that is included.

So considering I could use it for my photos and my sister thought it was a wonderful tool for creating art (in her case sketches), I have to give this two thumbs up as a product for the home.

Terrific software, horrendously slow.

Photoshop Elements is, as ever, wonderful software with a few new features worth having (most notably the magic extractor which extracts an object from its background). However it is so painfully slow that I am debating a return to Elements 3. I have used it on three different computers, one of which has 3GB of RAM. There isn't a good enough reason in my view to stick with Elements 4 when 3 worked so smoothly. Just to give an indication of just how slow it is, changing from text editor to cursor tool has taken over one minute on my 3GB machine. This becomes very weary making when simply retyping a caption becomes a ten minute job. Stick with Elements 3 until this has been ironed out.

The Best facial animation software at an amazing price!

This software does what it says and at a great price! I have been a fan of this product for a long time! It's nice to see Amazon are supporting it and bought it as soon as I knew Amazon had it. Hopefully they will also see the iClone Standard Edition also.

Photo editor good, organizer bad

This product is not the best organizer, but the photo editor is brilliant and much better than Photoshop elements 5. If you are looking for a photo organizer I recommend Google Picasa (www.google.co.uk/picasa).
Overall I find that Paint shop pro is the best picture editing software available and outshines Adobe Photoshop Elements.
Before you buy remember to go to the Corel website (www.corel.co.uk) and try the free 30 day trial.

Nuance Paperport 11.0

I have been a user of different Paperport versions for the past 6 years and am a highly experienced, savvy computer user. Unfortunately, my experience of version 11.0 mirrors that of other users who have complained bitterly on the web about awful product support. I also agree that the product does NOT do what it says on the box and agree with the user critics; - It is significantly slower than previous versions, clunky, and the manufacturer's websight quite unhelpful with a poor faq section. I was foolish enough to buy a second licence version for use on my Windows XP powerful laptop but had exactly the same experience as with my Windows Vista top of the range desktop - despite trying reformatting and totally clean installations of the respective hard disks in desperation. Also, I have never been able to get the indexer to work so cannot search the Paperport database for the files I have scanned into the computers, which defeats the goal of a paperless office. Paperport is an awful disappointment and a miserable buy. Don't go near it. Read the user reviews out there on the web first! I give the product 1 star.

Good features but slow performance

I upgraded to CS3 (from CS2) on a Dual 2.7GHz Power PC G5 - which was about as chunky as they come on the old Motorola chipset. I have maybe 20,000 images mostly in the 5-20 mb range. Bridge and Photoshop have added several excellent features including some great black and white processing, superior raw processing and a more sophisticated keywords system. They also made access to images in Bridge better through providing a keyword index and count that provides a sub-selection from a Find to or folder.

Other applications are similarly smarter and they are all beautifully integrated.

So far so good. But I also found a lot of problems with hanging, crashing and slowness in Bridge (that were not there before). There were also initially problems with the Bridge search as the system needed to 'visit' the folders to create an index and this did not work properly. Some of these problems were resolved but new ones keep coming along. Whether this is because of the chipset or poor quality control or bad design I don't know, but it can be very infuriating.

Solved My Colour Management Problems

Ordered yesterday, arrived this morning and monitor calibrated one hour later. Initially it gave me wierd results even though I had reset the LCD monitor to factory settings (as advised in the Spyder software). Then I realised I had the graphics card (Nvidia) set to use the previous Adobe Gamma profile (which was never that successful as you had to do it by eye). Reset the card to the"standard" profile re-calibrated using the Spyder and the monitor is now perfect. Best it has been and I have checked it against several websites that show calibration charts.

The previous reviewer may not have set his graphics card correctly before calibrating as this is what I did wrong and got some weird colours on the screen.

Why so much in the UK?

Amazon.com shows the price at $629.99, converting this using xe.com comes to £315. So why is it nearly £200 more expensive in the UK?

Nero - a good all round product

Easy to use, my twelve year old mastered it in under an hour. And it's only software that will convert panasonic d snap digital video into mp2 or 4 without losing the video or sound quality.

Magix Photo Story on Cd & DVD7 Delux

This is one of the best programs i have used in a long time so easy to use it realy is magix so easy to add sound tracks spoken audio music intros the lot there is so much you can do with this . Why dont you download the trial version first and see for yourself

CS3 - Wait Until Beta Bugs In This Alpha Edition Are Sorted

This software lives up to the promise on the box in terms of improved utility and image processing. However unlike CS2 which has worked faultlessly on my system (XP) the CS3 version is prone to crash with loss of work and this can be as often as every 5 minutes. Additionally tools may not work correctly or you may experience a wait of several seconds before the tool is operable. On top of this there is a European backlash about the pricing of this product which is at least a third more expensive than in the USA. I wish I'd waited

Greenstreet 320,000 Images (DVD) (PC)

A very comprehensive range of Clipart and Photos. Excellent value.With such a large number of images it takes a little practice to get used to but it very soon becomes quite easy to use. I purchased this DVD as I was having difficulty finding Clipart for use with Windows Vista but this collection works well with Vista and is an ideal companion for Serif Drawplus 8.