Paint Shop versus Photopaint?

[Aptivaboy]

Good afternoon,

My apologies if this isn't the proper forum (first time poster). I'm waffling between buying a new graphics program, either some version of Painter/Paint Shop Pro, or Photopaint within the Corel Draw suite. I can't quite seem to find a serious comparison between the two programs. Can anyone help out? Is there a significant difference? Is Paint Shop essentially another version of Photopaint? Can Paint Shop and/or Photopaint accept Adobe ADR brushes? That's a major issue for me.

Thank you again for any pointers or references to comparisons between the two, and again, apologies if this isn't the proper place to ask the question.

Bob

[Kathy_9]

Hello Bob and welcome to the forum.

My recommendation would be to download trial copies of the programs and decide which fits your needs.

By the way, Corel Draw is not supported in this forum. They have a separate forum here https://community.coreldraw.com/talk/

And Painter here https://painterfactory.com/

[ehume]

As best I can tell Photopaint is an old Corel program that Corel appears no longer to sell. PSP has been around since the 1990s. JASC sold it to Corel in the middle of PSP9. PSP X and PSP XI were Corel products but their essential look (UI) was unchanged. Somewhere around PSP12 (I have a gap from PSP12 to PSP13), they merged PSP with another editor and took a new look; Corel also changed the numbering to PSPx, like PSPx4, PSPx9, etc. After PSPx9, Corel changed the numbering again, so that PSP20 = PSPx10 = PSP 2018.


Considering that Corel's Photopaint is no longer around, I suspect your surmise is correct. PSP is often held up as a subscription-free competitor to Photoshop. It is a bitmap graphics editor with rudimentary raw capabilities. For SVG you can get Inkscape free on the web. For raw, something probably came with your camera. As a bitmap graphics editor, you can see that a lot of us really do like PSP. PSP is a flexible, powerful graphics editor.

[Ken Berry]

As best I can tell Photopaint is an old Corel program that Corel appears no longer to sell.

That's not at all accurate. Photopaint is still very much a part of the CorelDRAW package. When you buy DRAW you get Photopaint. There are some who would argue it is better or more advanced than PSP, but that sort of argument is I suppose inevitable between any competing products. I think, though, that you can't buy Photopaint as a separate product -- only as part of DRAW.

See https://www.coreldraw.com/en/pages/photo-paint/

[bruce1951]

I may get yelled at here for this, because it's not a Corel product, but why not have a look at KRITA?
It's free, which is a good point!
Has way more flexibility.

I still use PSP for a few favourite tools and features. But for various reasons I shifted away from PSP. I now use Photoline which is way more powerful than PSP. And cheaper! From Photoline I can launch KRITA and do all my graphic and painting tasks. Flip back to Photoline and continue with it's features. Another alternative would be to use PSP to launch KRITA as a plugin.

But it's just my opinion!!!!