General Corel Products Advice

[dadepfan]

Hello everyone!

My primary interest, because I have very little drawing or painting talent, is starting with my photos and digitally manipulating them for artistic effect. This can be anything from enhancing the photo to turning it into a painting or other form of art.

I have Corel Paintshop Pro 2021, Corel Painter 2020, Corel Painter Essentials 7, and Corel Aftershot Pro 3. I usually shoot RAW files and bring them into On1 Photo RAW 2021 for initial processing and possibly adding some metadata. I then export them as full-sized JPEG files for further manipulation in the Corel products (at least that is my plan, I have not done a lot yet).

So, my general question involves workflow and what to use the different Corel products for. Is there somewhere I can find a general description as to what each Corel product in best used for, and/or can someone here suggest a workflow? Is it better to create a paint file or vector from the JPEG file, work on that within the Corel products, and then export another JPEG at the end?

Additionally, can someone tell me how Corel handles image metadata? If I add keywords and metadata in On1 Photo RAW, this information gets added to the exported JPEG file. Will this then appear when I bring that JPG file into the Corel products, and what happens to it if I pass the image through several Corel products?

Finally, I just purchased and installed a mega bundle that was advertised when I opened Paintshop Pro 2021. It was the Mega Bundle 2020 Ultimate, which included ParticleShop, AI HDY Studio, and the Ultimate Script Bundle Volume 2. All three downloaded and installed without problems, but I'm not sure where these will show up - inside Paintshop Pro or Painter? The listing of items in the ad from which I purchased this mega bundle seemed to include other things like a script bundle 1, two bundles (1 & 2) of something else like brushes or creative contact, and something called Pic-To-Paint. There was no sign of these other things in the purchase email I received or during download or installation, but they may have been included in the Ultimate Script Bundle Volume 2, ParticleShop, or AI HDY Studio installations.

What say yee!

[Kathy_9]

Hello dadepfan and welcome to the forum. I've moved your post to the PaintShop Pro forum as I think you will receive more replies here.

[JoeB]

My first suggestion is that you NOT export/save your files as jpg from the start. Every time you save as jpg the file gets compressed and loses some image data. Until such time as you need a jpg you should first save your files in a non-lossy format - pspimage, png or tif. When working on the files you will likely need to use layerss at a minimum. So you will need to save those work files as pspimage files to preserve layers, masks, etc.

[dadepfan]

Thanks Kathy for moving the post, and thanks Joe for your response! I am still researching and testing.

[Kathy_9]

You may get some ideas at the Corel Discovery Center.

https://learn.corel.com/

[dadepfan]

Thanks for the response.

When I bring a RAW file into PSP and then save it as a PSD file, I cannot bring that file into either Painter or Painter Essentials because it has a 16-bit color depth and these two Corel programs want it to be 8-bit. If I save it as a Tiff file, it is huge and these two Corel programs will not open it, giving me a message saying that the file has an unsupported number of Bits Per Sample.

Dave

My first suggestion is that you NOT export/save your files as jpg from the start. Every time you save as jpg the file gets compressed and loses some image data. Until such time as you need a jpg you should first save your files in a non-lossy format - pspimage, png or tif. When working on the files you will likely need to use layerss at a minimum. So you will need to save those work files as pspimage files to preserve layers, masks, etc.

[JoeB]

I can only assume that those two programs don't support 16 bit/channel images. In PSP go to Image>Decrease Color Depth and choose RGB 8 bits/channel from the popout menu. And yes, tif files will be larger than jpgs for sure because that is a lossless format (i.e., when saving as tif you aren't throwing away some of the image data like you are when saving as jpg). When saving as tif make sure to check the options in the Save dialogue and make sure you select LZW compression from the available options. It will still be a large file however, but with storage being inexpensive and plentiful that shouldn't be an issue.

[dadepfan]

Thanks Joe...