Corel has just announced it’s latest installation to the Paint Shop Pro series, the Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2.

I have always been a Paint Shop Pro fan, since the Jasc days, and lately I have been observing the shift towards becoming a Photoshop CS2 wannabe graphics software day-by-day. Luckily, my initial worries proved me wrong, as the new features introduced with the first version released under Corel, v10 wasn’t that bad at all. As a matter of fact, it had become even more useful for photo manipulators.

It has always been an easy-to-use program and that’s what has drawn the regular consumers out there to the software. Photoshop is an industry standard, well almost, but it’s not only expensive but also hard, very hard to use for a beginner. Even I had trouble picking some stuff up at first, having been so used to Paint Shop Pro for years (since v3 I believe). People expect to have easy features that can help them with basic tasks such as removing red eyes, bleaching teeth and removing stains from clothing.

I thought that v10 had already solved many of the basic needs of the software for it to become a mainstream photo-editing tool.

After I installed v11, which was a HUGE letdown due to the fact that almost EVERYTHING was working slow (even when I moved my mouse curser over a workframe of 300×300 px there was some choking going on), making me even revert back to v10 after a couple hours of usage, I was reluctant to download the trial version of x12 (more commonly referred to as Photo X2) at first.

At this very moment, I’m downloading the trial, before I pay a full $99 for the download version of the software (I can’t buy the upgrade, I believe, as I actually never purchased the version before. I have to check if upgrades can happen from v10 to v12, which I doubt).

I will let you guys know what I think about X2 after I test it out extensively.