OtherOption - No problem
Bruce - Sorry its taken me along time to reply, i was banned from the forums for a few days
I'm actually using the 30day trail at the moment, trying to decide if it was worth the upgrade myself. And already after using it for 10 days, i can yes it is. This program is
excellent. I noticed a huge performance difference in corel, when editing large photos, the changes are loading a lot faster than in PSP 7/8. The software is aimed much more at photographers, they have slightly changed the order to menus and options, but for the better. Image and Adjust are now before Effects, which makes sense to me, and also some of the options that were in sub menus, have been moved to the main menu, making them accessible faster. Corel have obviously listened to a lot of customers for the of making this. There is also some new features like an aperture manipulation tool to change the depth of field of photos, and High pass sharpening, which can give some very nice effects. There is a lot more that i hadn't seen before, but this might of been because they were hidden away in submenus in older versions of PSP. (Fill Flash, Backlighting, Skin Smoothing)
I was hesitant at first about a different design layout, but i can safely say the changes they made have helped, and not confused. In my opinion its worth upgrading just for the performance increase (I also heard theres a dualcore patch coming out soon, which will increase performance even more so.)
CS2 seems to be more than a fashion accessory than image editing software, which is a shame because PSP is just as good, if not a better piece of software. I often get photoshop users asking me how i did something in PSP, and how they can recreate something similar in PS. And thats the problem, people spend 500 odd quid on a piece of software to sharpen images, simply because they can't figure out how to do anything else. If you want the technology of photoshop, but want something easy and clear to use, go for corel XI and save yourself £450
