My Top 11 Still Unresolved (as of 2022) PSP Issues

[westingtyler]

Hello! I just wrote this all in a text document to vent, because I need to do that sometimes, and then I checked to see if a forum exists, and it does, so maybe there is actual help for some of these issues or hope they can be resolved in the future. I use PaintShop Pro X9 (2016) and have for years, as well as previous versions. It's fantastic except for some issues that still exist. I recently tried out the PainShop Pro 22 demo, excited to see if these issues were fixed or improved so I could buy an upgrade or full version, but alas, the following issues STILL seem to be an issue. A lot of these are about motion economy (wasted extra clicks and sub menus, having to stop working to fix the program, etc.)

This post is to
1) ask if anyone knows how to fix these 11 issues, if there are fixes, and
2) see which are not fixed so I can cleanly add them to the stickied wish list for 2023 thread.

A: MANDATORY UNDOCKING
you can force the toolbars to NOT dock, but you can't force them to STAY docked; to lock a bar so grabbing it doesn't undock it. so every time I try to change my brush opacity by clicking on the toolbar, I risk undocking the whole thing, ruining my brainflow state, and having to stop working to do maintenance and reattach it, and making sure to be more careful next time, when I'm trying to just carefree paint. because the toolbar options are so tiny, it's like playing Operation clicking the tiny sliders, which adds silly stress to my painting work.

B: GIANT TOP TABS
and the big tabs at the top (MANAGE, ADJUST, EDIT) create a thick bar that takes up a big chunk of screen space, and I see no option to disable that stuff. All I need is the Edit tab. Ever. Pressing SHIFT+A goes into full screen and removes the entire top bar which means it also removes the image info at the bottom, and also the minimize, close, etc. buttons at the top right, so it's not great. I want to disable this entire bar but retain the top right buttons and bottom info, like, merge the top right buttons onto the row below that. that big thick bar just takes up a lot of space, and I shouldn't have to go into a temporary "fullscreen" mode to get rid of it.

C: AUTO DUPLICATING SELECTION LAYER
on a raster layer I try to pick/rescale, and it duplicates the image on a new VECTOR layer. but only sometimes? sometimes it just duplicates it to a raster layer. I don't want two copies of what I'm scaling. this has always bugged me. because then I have to later delete the lower layer with the unscaled image, then merge the vector or new layer down to convert it to a raster layer. instead of it just scaling the actual raster layer selection I tried to scale, to begin with. I tried the option to "always ask", but instead of it "always asking if I want to duplicate the layer as a new layer" it just has a pop-up that tells me 'in order to do this operation it must be duplicated as a new layer." that's weird. I just want to scale what I've selected, not duplicate it then scale the duplicate. when scaling I don't want to create a new layer, except in regard to the current selection itself being a temporary new layer that merges down when unselected afterward, like a normal selection.

D: GRAB TOOL AND SCROLLBAR LAG/SMEARING/GHOSTING ARTIFACTS
the smearing when using the grab tool or moving parts of image, how it streaks (creates duplicating image artifacts) until you release it, and it's hard to see what you've moved where until you resize and refresh the image. if anyone wants a video of this I can make one. it gets worse the longer the image is open, and using the scrollbars does it, too.

E: WE NEED BRUSH ALT ADJUSTMENTS, MORE THAN JUST SIZE
Whoever implemented ALt+Click+Drag for brush scaling deserves a medal, but we need that for more brush toolbar things. I wish there were controls like the alt brush scaling, but for opacity and hardness and density. (and for saturation and brightness like in sketchbook pro, so intuitive.) Using a single key + the mouse movement, is GREAT. but having to go up to the toolbar menu, to the tiny little text window or its tiny little sliders, and HOPE I don't accidentally grab and undock the entire toolbar, just to change the opacity/density/hardness a bit, is obnoxious. Blender also has good texture painting tools like this, too, of another example of how it can be done well.

F: BURIED BRUSH AND BRUSH PRESETS
having to go into a drop-down menu to select my brushes or brush presets, is obnoxious. I should be able to dock those menus or better, hold CONTROL or something and have a radial of brushes I've made show up, and I drag and release to select one. Would be awesome. Of course I'd need these presets less, if I could just do the ALT+CLICK+DRAG thing like for brush scaling, but for opacity, density, and hardness.

G: NO PREFS EXPORT
also, I don't know how to export all my setting sand shortcuts. so if my computer messes up and I have to reinstall, I'll probably lose ALLLLL my customized toolbars, keyboard shortcuts, and other settings that I've fine-tuned over years. there doesn't seem to be a built-in way to import them into the new 2022 demo it seems, meaning I'd have to go redo all of them. In Blender you just hit "export preferences" and it creates a file. then in a new version of Blender you can hit "import preferences" and choose that file. boom. should be standard everywhere.

H: SHORTCUT SETUP MISERY
setting keyboard shortcuts requires me to go find overlapping ones and delete their shortcuts, then go back to the command I want to add one for, then add it again.

specifically, I go to command I want to create a shortcut for (why can't I search for its name like in Blender?) I click the new key I want, it says "this is already used by (command)." I can't just click "overwrite" or have a setting to auto-overwrite it. I have to remember the name of the conflicting command. go find it manually in the All Commands list (again because there's no command name search, and it doesn't tell me which menu it's on), clear its assignment, go back and re-find the command I want to make a new shortcut for, then add the command. all without forgetting what I'm doing, which is difficult involving remembering text, when one has ADHD.

there's a Reset All button RIGHT THERE NEXT TO the "this command it taken already by X" text, which i was always afraid to try in X9 2016 installation because, "what if instead of meaning what it should logically mean, which is "clear this hotkey for new use" it actually means "Reset All" like it says? well, in the 2022 demo I went ahead and pressed it, and it came up with a prompt that it was going to RESET EVERYTHING, as I feared. why is this HERE? instead of an OVERWRITE button being there? these strange UI decisions sometimes make me nervous I'll accidentally mess up something while working and have to spend the next half a day just redoing my shortcut commands or something (since I can't just reimport my prefs).

I: MEMORY LEAK?
I need to restart the app every hour or so, it it slowly becomes more laggy until eventually it crashes when I try to do something (after about 5 hours of continuous use actual crash happens. some days I use it for 15 hours straight, and all this is why I just make sure to restart it every hour or so, which, needless to say, hampers my workflow). to be specific, zooming and scrolling actions create more of the jittery image duplication artifacting the longer the app has been open. I'm doing some tests to see if this is the undo system or scratch disk or something. but I'm not optimistic about preventing this slow degradation.

J: SPAM POPUP ADS ON FULL-PRICE SOFTWARE
One version of PSP kept spamming my desktop with popup ads every few days. Not sure if I was able to prevent those or if I reverted to a previous version. it was spamming me with ads AFTER I'd already paid full price, which is a cardinal sin to me and ruins my ability to be productive. Anyway, this is not an issue right now, and I hope upgrading doesn't bring it back ever.

K: NO SUBSCRIPTIONS PLEASE
I've always gladly purchased PaintShop Pro, but I don't do subscription programs. only mentioning this because on the Corel Support twitter it mentions "subscriber-exclusive updates." which makes me worried that offering any of these suggestions, to use any of the fixes that may come of it, I'd have to do some Adobe-like subscription, which I don't want. I hope Paintshop Pro with new features is always offered as a standalone product to purchase.

CONCLUSION:
Checking the 2022 demo, 6 years after my 2016 version, NONE of the above issues seem to be fixed or improved. the grab tool creates a bit less "lag smear" when moving the image around. nice. and I can scale the icons. but that seems to be it. Strangely, I also could not find any of the AI stuff advertised anywhere in Edit mode. Right now it seems that if I wanted to upgrade from 2016 to 2022, I'd be paying $100 for GUI scaling options, which isn't my cup of tea. if any ONE of the issues I've listed had been fixed, I'd upgrade gladly, but for now I'm stuck with the 6-year-old version.

If I'm wrong about any of these things and someone knows what I can do to access some of those features, I really want to know! Thank you for reading.

[LeviFiction]

To answer your statement in your conclusion, in PSP2022 the AI stuff is under the Adjust -> Artificial Intelligence menu. The Style Transfer features are built into the Instant Effects Palette.

A: MANDATORY UNDOCKING
you can force the toolbars to NOT dock, but you can't force them to STAY docked; to lock a bar so grabbing it doesn't undock it. so every time I try to change my brush opacity by clicking on the toolbar, I risk undocking the whole thing, ruining my brainflow state, and having to stop working to do maintenance and reattach it, and making sure to be more careful next time, when I'm trying to just carefree paint. because the toolbar options are so tiny, it's like playing Operation clicking the tiny sliders, which adds silly stress to my painting work.

No locking of toolbars has been added.

B: GIANT TOP TABS
and the big tabs at the top (MANAGE, ADJUST, EDIT) create a thick bar that takes up a big chunk of screen space, and I see no option to disable that stuff. All I need is the Edit tab. Ever. Pressing SHIFT+A goes into full screen and removes the entire top bar which means it also removes the image info at the bottom, and also the minimize, close, etc. buttons at the top right, so it's not great. I want to disable this entire bar but retain the top right buttons and bottom info, like, merge the top right buttons onto the row below that. that big thick bar just takes up a lot of space, and I shouldn't have to go into a temporary "fullscreen" mode to get rid of it.

As you know since you already tried 2022 they are still there.

C: AUTO DUPLICATING SELECTION LAYER
on a raster layer I try to pick/rescale, and it duplicates the image on a new VECTOR layer. but only sometimes? sometimes it just duplicates it to a raster layer. I don't want two copies of what I'm scaling. this has always bugged me. because then I have to later delete the lower layer with the unscaled image, then merge the vector or new layer down to convert it to a raster layer. instead of it just scaling the actual raster layer selection I tried to scale, to begin with. I tried the option to "always ask", but instead of it "always asking if I want to duplicate the layer as a new layer" it just has a pop-up that tells me 'in order to do this operation it must be duplicated as a new layer." that's weird. I just want to scale what I've selected, not duplicate it then scale the duplicate. when scaling I don't want to create a new layer, except in regard to the current selection itself being a temporary new layer that merges down when unselected afterward, like a normal selection.

This is not a problem I'm familiar with at all. Especially not duplicating the vector layer on scaling. I've never seen that.

With a raster layer if you have an active selection (such as say hitting CTRL + A to select everything) then scaling will create a promoted selection that would be a full duplicate copy of your current layer. But if you're working on only a small selection and want to scale then the promoted selection will be a copy of only the selected area. This is normal. Are you saying you want to be able to scale a floating selection? A floating selection lets you work on a selected area of pixels, move them around, etc, temporarily as a separate layer then when you defaloat or deselect the selection it auto-merges back into the layer it's sitting above. Floating selections don't currently let you scale, they have to be full layers before scaling is allowed.

D: GRAB TOOL AND SCROLLBAR LAG/SMEARING/GHOSTING ARTIFACTS
the smearing when using the grab tool or moving parts of image, how it streaks (creates duplicating image artifacts) until you release it, and it's hard to see what you've moved where until you resize and refresh the image. if anyone wants a video of this I can make one. it gets worse the longer the image is open, and using the scrollbars does it, too.

Have you turned on full-window redraw? I'm told that reduces it.

E: WE NEED BRUSH ALT ADJUSTMENTS, MORE THAN JUST SIZE
Whoever implemented ALt+Click+Drag for brush scaling deserves a medal, but we need that for more brush toolbar things. I wish there were controls like the alt brush scaling, but for opacity and hardness and density. (and for saturation and brightness like in sketchbook pro, so intuitive.) Using a single key + the mouse movement, is GREAT. but having to go up to the toolbar menu, to the tiny little text window or its tiny little sliders, and HOPE I don't accidentally grab and undock the entire toolbar, just to change the opacity/density/hardness a bit, is obnoxious. Blender also has good texture painting tools like this, too, of another example of how it can be done well.

Nope

F: BURIED BRUSH AND BRUSH PRESETS
having to go into a drop-down menu to select my brushes or brush presets, is obnoxious. I should be able to dock those menus or better, hold CONTROL or something and have a radial of brushes I've made show up, and I drag and release to select one. Would be awesome. Of course I'd need these presets less, if I could just do the ALT+CLICK+DRAG thing like for brush scaling, but for opacity, density, and hardness.

This is a wishlist item

G: NO PREFS EXPORT
also, I don't know how to export all my setting sand shortcuts. so if my computer messes up and I have to reinstall, I'll probably lose ALLLLL my customized toolbars, keyboard shortcuts, and other settings that I've fine-tuned over years. there doesn't seem to be a built-in way to import them into the new 2022 demo it seems, meaning I'd have to go redo all of them. In Blender you just hit "export preferences" and it creates a file. then in a new version of Blender you can hit "import preferences" and choose that file. boom. should be standard everywhere.

Nothing built-in. I do have scripts for this though.

H: SHORTCUT SETUP MISERY
setting keyboard shortcuts requires me to go find overlapping ones and delete their shortcuts, then go back to the command I want to add one for, then add it again.

specifically, I go to command I want to create a shortcut for (why can't I search for its name like in Blender?) I click the new key I want, it says "this is already used by (command)." I can't just click "overwrite" or have a setting to auto-overwrite it. I have to remember the name of the conflicting command. go find it manually in the All Commands list (again because there's no command name search, and it doesn't tell me which menu it's on), clear its assignment, go back and re-find the command I want to make a new shortcut for, then add the command. all without forgetting what I'm doing, which is difficult involving remembering text, when one has ADHD.

there's a Reset All button RIGHT THERE NEXT TO the "this command it taken already by X" text, which i was always afraid to try in X9 2016 installation because, "what if instead of meaning what it should logically mean, which is "clear this hotkey for new use" it actually means "Reset All" like it says? well, in the 2022 demo I went ahead and pressed it, and it came up with a prompt that it was going to RESET EVERYTHING, as I feared. why is this HERE? instead of an OVERWRITE button being there? these strange UI decisions sometimes make me nervous I'll accidentally mess up something while working and have to spend the next half a day just redoing my shortcut commands or something (since I can't just reimport my prefs).

I believe that button is there in case you want to quickly reset everything you're doing because you realized you made a mistake or want to quickly start over. Sadly Customize is not scriptable.

I: MEMORY LEAK?
I need to restart the app every hour or so, it it slowly becomes more laggy until eventually it crashes when I try to do something (after about 5 hours of continuous use actual crash happens. some days I use it for 15 hours straight, and all this is why I just make sure to restart it every hour or so, which, needless to say, hampers my workflow). to be specific, zooming and scrolling actions create more of the jittery image duplication artifacting the longer the app has been open. I'm doing some tests to see if this is the undo system or scratch disk or something. but I'm not optimistic about preventing this slow degradation.

Turn off History logging. General Preference s-> Miscellaneous -> Uncheck "Save edit history to image metadata" this is essentially saving a really long script of every action you take. Including the entire texture, or pattern, or long brush stories you make. We've seen this get up to over 300MB before and it's probably worse for others.

I have a script to remove saved history form PSPImage files.

J: SPAM POPUP ADS ON FULL-PRICE SOFTWARE
One version of PSP kept spamming my desktop with popup ads every few days. Not sure if I was able to prevent those or if I reverted to a previous version. it was spamming me with ads AFTER I'd already paid full price, which is a cardinal sin to me and ruins my ability to be productive. Anyway, this is not an issue right now, and I hope upgrading doesn't bring it back ever.

While it is true PSP has become effectively adware in a lot of ways, they've started moving most ads to the built-in store. The pop-up ads can usually successfully be turned off in the Help Menu -> Message Preferecnes. I don't have any issues with ads on my computer after turning those off.

K: NO SUBSCRIPTIONS PLEASE
I've always gladly purchased PaintShop Pro, but I don't do subscription programs. only mentioning this because on the Corel Support twitter it mentions "subscriber-exclusive updates." which makes me worried that offering any of these suggestions, to use any of the fixes that may come of it, I'd have to do some Adobe-like subscription, which I don't want. I hope Paintshop Pro with new features is always offered as a standalone product to purchase.

Obviously as no one here is from Corel (or the equity firm that bought them) we cannot speak to their ultimate goal and future plans. That being said, while Corel supposedly has a subscription option in the Microsoft Store for PSP the main software is still subscription free and it's considered one of their selling points as when they originally polled the community it was a pretty resounding NO from most of us. Especially at the price they were talking about. Unless main corporate decides to screw themselves over with the longer-term users (since there are cheaper non-subscription based competition that does a number of things better) they will offer non-subscription based versions for quite some time. Especially if people keep complaining about how horrible subscriptions are, though probably less so if people aren't buying the new versions either.

[westingtyler]

Thanks for the heads-up for the AI tools location. I'm excited to try them out.

"No locking of toolbars has been added."

I'm not sure if I know what this means. I see there's a tickbox to "prevent docking" of toolbars, but I am wondering if the opposite exists; the ability to prevent them from being grab-moveable/undockable. I constantly click the brush opacity slider to change opacity, but if I miss and click the toolbar itself and drag, it undocks the whole thing, and I have to stop working to fix it. is there an option to prevent it from UNdocking, so I cannot re arrange the toolbars without going into preferences to allow it? that's what I need.

Yes, my issue is about scaling floating selection. For example, right now I have a giant image with a bunch of images in it, and they all need to be scaled down individually to fit into the grid (128x128 pixel grid squares). So currently I box select one area, go into pick, scale it down, deselect. now I try to box select the next area but it tells me THERE'S NO IMAGE DATA. and that's because I've been moved up to a new layer that was created that contains only the other image I already scaled down. So I have to keep manually merging layers after every single scaling action. which, when an image contains 80 images that need to be individually scaled, gets tedious. Is there some option to auto merge the scaled section down a layer, after I'm done scaling? that would help a lot.

I turned on full window redraw and it DOES seem to fix some of the ghosting caused by scrolling and moving around. AWESOME.

I just turned off the "save history in file" thing, and we'll see if performance stops degrading over the hours of use. awesome.

thanks for your insights and help. just these couple of settings changes I can see will already make me way more productive.

[westingtyler]

I wrote another reply back, but also here is a video showing the layer duplication thing. sometimes when I scale it duplicates the image and puts it on a new layer. other times it just puts it on a new layer. the new layer thing is also always obnoxious, and I wish there was a way to make it merge down after it scales so I don't have to manually merge layers all the time. It's also worth noting that Microsoft Paint scan scale without creating and leaving behind a trial of extra layers, so I don't know why PSP can't do this. is there a setting? https://youtu.be/hKeeiiNh4so

[LeviFiction]

"No locking of toolbars has been added" means that no such feature has been added. Sorry for my poor word choice.

What you show in the video I don't personally consider to be a problem. The reason for this being that while the methods shown are annoying for your very unique and odd use case they are highly useful and preferred for almost all others. Based on what you showed in your video I can tell you why it sometimes creates a duplicate and why sometimes it just promotes the selection to its own layer cutting it out of the original. You're using multiple methods.

When you just click on a selection with the pick tool or attempt to scale it, PSP creates a promoted selection (duplicating the selected data to a permanent new layer). However, in a few instances you first floated the selection, a floated selection actually cuts the data out of the layer (similar to how Microsoft Paint does it) it's meant for moving the data around and dropping it back down auto-merging it into the layer. Floated selections cannot be scaled, the reason is that they have their transparency locked, preserving it. So scaling the floating selection promotes it to a full layer just like before. This means that floating the selection before scaling will prevent the need to remove the old data from the layer before or after merging removing cleanup.

The fastest way to float a selection is to Left Click inside of the selection with the Selection tool. Not the magic wand tool. That immediately floats it. This one thing will prevent the need for the clean up steps you showed on a few instances in your video.

How often do you do this kind of thing? It's so weird to see a single image full of a bunch of tiny screenshots. Did they start that way or did you put them that way? If this is a constant need and the size you're resizing to is always consistent you can script this pretty easily turning it into a three step process. Select the image, then run the script, move floated selection into place. The next time you make as selection the previous floating selection will auto-merge back down. it will need to be an intelligent script, so some programming required but still relatively simple.

[Luna Esterhuizen]

Since 2019 I've purchased all Paintshop Pro versions, the last 2 versions was Ultimate versions. I am so disappointed in Paintshop as the latest version is crashing all the time, no matter what you do. Unexpectedly and abruptly it just jumps out of the program.
For many years I used Uleads Photo Impact X3 and have to install it again and again to do editing in layers as Paintshop is just not working.
I spent so much time on tutorial to give Paintshop a chance, but it was not worth the effort as the program is useless.
This is the first time I referred to this forum for answers so I just search for "crashing" issues and here is the answer. I wish I've never spent on this as I could have saved the money for more useable apps.
I give up on this.

[LeviFiction]

I sent a private message but I also want to post here.

If you have the time, usually only a few hours a day for a few months a year, and you actively want PSP to be better and you're experiencing issues like frequent crashes that most other users do not appear to be experiencing. Consider signing up to be a beta tester. The more testers, the more hardware configurations, the greater the possible stability.

https://www.corel.com/en/pages/beta/?ut ... mpaign=PSP

[Luna Esterhuizen]

Just after I posted the thread I tried to run PSP 2022 ULTIMATE again it crashed again. I contacted Dell as I have a new Laptop running Windows 11,no problem found on the hardware.
So, I installed the 10 year ol Photoimpact again and it runs like a gem. I have an urgent project to complete and cannot struggle with issues now. I'll have a look at you suggestions.