March 2019 RRP $5

Issue 104

Tools toolbar

Quick Customize

The Essentials Tools toolbar is simple but customizable for photo

editing and design workflows.

Essentials workspace

What’s New

Clean and easy on the eyes, this streamlined workspace is perfect

for new users and experienced users who work with a core set of

features.

Customize the size of icons, nodes, and scroll bars.

The workspace colour and background colour can be

selected here too.

Use Quick Customize to hide or show the controls you want.

Select colours, patterns and textures from the Materials palette. Use the Palettes

menu to show more palettes

Palettes

User interface customization

Corel PaintShop Pro 2019

Essentials workspace

Tools toolbar

Quick Customize Palettes

…and much more. See review on following pages for more details

Corelunder, No.104, March 2019, 2

Corel PaintShop Pro (PSP) has long been a less

expensive alternative to Photoshop. Unlike the

high-end Photoshop, the PSP software provides

the power, tools and friendly user base to serve a

wide market, from professional and amateur

photographers and artists to business users. The

new version, PaintShop Pro 2019, continues to be

a great value for this user-friendly, yet powerful

program. But its new creative tools, incremental

improvements, expanded content and

performance fixes may not represent a compelling

upgrade over the previous version.

Two new creative tools

PaintShop Pro is a mature program that already had just about all the tools and functions you can think of for creating and editing photographs, digital images and business graphics. However, Corel added two cool new creative tools for this edition: support for editing 360-degree photos, and a set of filters that use deep neural networks to emulate “master painter” styles.

You also can bring your 360-degree image into the main workspace and use Adjust and Effects tools (such as those that affect brightness, sharpness, tone and color).

PSP 2019 has a more streamlined interface than previous versions.

The separate 360-degree edit window offers two functions: Straighten, and Remove Tripod Head. Even if you don't want to even out the horizon on your image, you will probably want to check out the Straighten view. It's the only place in PSP where you can interactively pan and zoom through the full 360 degrees of your capture. In the noninteractive Remove Tripod Head view of the window, you can use selection tools and content-aware fill to easily delete portions of your tripod that may be visible in the photo. It would be nice if you could use those tools to remove other objects in the image.

The Pic-to-Painting plug-in uses artificial intelligence to produce one-click effects emulating several different painting styles, with attractive nonuniform brush strokes. Note that this filter works on 64-bit Windows 10 systems only.

These first two types of edits won't affect the image metadata, which means that when you save the file, you will be able to use a third-party viewer, such as Facebook's, to interactively pan and tilt through the 360-degree capture.

Simplified Interface

Keeping up with the new generation of cameras that can capture 360-degree photos, there are three ways to edit such images — through a dedicated edit window, the main workspace or by

converting the image.

PaintShop Pro's interface is easy to understand, with intelligent learning tools right within the workspace where you need them. This includes a library of excellent video and written tutorials (available through the newly designed Welcome screen) and a context-sensitive Learning Center palette that provides guidance for the selected tool.

Performance and tool enhancements

The PSP program has a number of under-the-hood improvements. In fact, Corel said that it's applied more than 50 fixes, including better 4K screen support. For instance, boot-up time is noticeably quicker. (Fifty percent faster, according to Corel's claims.)

Finally, you can convert your 360-degree photo to a flat, non-pannable image, which destroys that particular metadata. But it allows you to edit the picture as a panorama, or use the fun Planet Effects feature that turns the picture into a circular tiny planet or rabbit-hole image.

Anecdotally, I found that several tools were faster in the PSP 2019. For example, the one-step Photo

The PSP 2019 has a more streamlined interface than previous versions. The default workspace has less clutter, but you can customize it to display whatever tools and palettes you wish. You can even change the size of the font, scroll bars and icons.

Corel PaintShop Pro 2019A Review

... continued on page 7

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Stunning triple vision PHONESALICE CLARKE

For many people, camera quality is the main feature that guides them to their new phone. More power, more storage and better connectivity are important for the more hardcore users, but everyone else just wants to be able to take better photos of their dog or their dinner (or, in limited cases, their dog’s dinner) without having to carry around a standalone camera. That’s why every manufacturer at MWC last week was announcing phones with better cameras, more lenses and smarter AI.

So, after six days with the Samsung Galaxy S10+, here’s how I’ve found the main rear-facing cameras.There are three lenses: zoom (45 degrees), wide (77) and ultra-wide (123). This is the same set-up as the smaller S10, though the less expensive S10e drops the zoom lens.

Wide is your standard camera view, zoom gives you a 2x optical zoom which makes for much better close-ups, and ultra-wide gives a slight fisheye effect but fits in a lot more of the world around you. I was stunned by how much of a difference the three lenses made, and how much I found myself utilising all of them while touring around San Francisco.

In standard photo mode you can use Scene Optimiser, which can determine between 30 different scene categories and then makes the photo look the best it can. This was the most obvious in my photos of Muir Woods, where having Scene Optimiser on made the greens greener. It did make them look a little surreal in their greenness, but it added a magic that you can edit out later if you choose.

For those who aren’t great at taking photos and want to get better, Shot Suggestions are great. The app finds the best spot to point the camera and helps you make it level. Obviously, this AI doesn’t get it right all the time, but most times it made a good point about which angle would make the better photo. As an added bonus, if you hold it in the right spot for a moment it’ll just automatically take the photo for you.It’s OK at taking photos at night, but not in the same league as the Google Pixel 3.

The best new thing about shooting videos (aside from HDR10+, which isn’t available to test yet) is the Super Steady Video mode. It’s similar to what’s in the new GoPro range, and makes your shaky footage of little Wilhelmina’s fifth birthday party almost look like you shot it on a gimble.

What’s less good about the rear camera is poor old Bixby. Bixby is the digital assistant that stretches the term “smart” the furthest. On lens mode, Bixby Vision suggests similar photos and products you can buy. I cannot stress enough how much you should never accidentally point Bixby vision at your bare leg; it gave me images of a toddler who had a nappy malfunction and then a lot of photos of people with injuries. Pointing it at a box for the LucidSound LS41 gaming headset had it suggest I buy a Nike Sports band.

Pointing it at the Black Panther Blu-ray also did nothing. Hopefully this will be improved before launch, but it would be better if Samsung just put Bixby out of its misery.The author travelled to San Fransisco as a guest of Samsung.

Meanwhile, Bixby Vision AR Experiences mode is supposed to help you put decor in your room or find movie trailers. It placed a giant bed that I couldn’t resize in my bedroom, and despite having an entire empty hallway to play with it would only place a mammoth ottoman halfway through a door. I tried to give it an easier task of finding movies by pointing it at posters for Supergirl, Xena and Carmilla to no avail.

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Drawing Human Figures?Lance Fishman provides us with some handy reference drawings to help with gender differences and proportions

Unlike Android, WearOS doesn’t feel like software that scales especially well to lowerpowered devices. I found it quite laggy on these watches, and I had unusual gaps in my Google Fit record where it doesn’t

These watches go for around $240 and $280, which puts them a bit below the price of the ‘‘classic’’ Ticwatch C2 and well below the Pro, and the only difference between them is that the more expensive S2 is built a bit more rugged for outdoorsy types. Both are quite thick at 12.9mm and have a very plastic feel, looking somewhere between a nice watch and a dedicated fitness tracker. Mobvoi’s built-in watch faces are very nice and customisable, which is great given what a slog it is to get more from Google’s store. The watches come with GPS and a heartrate monitor, and unlike the C2 and Pro, they’re designed so track swimming as well as your less aquatic exercise. The downside is that, unlike the C2, these do not support contactless payments. The battery struggles to make it to two full days, so they like an overnight charge and so aren’t great for sleep tracking.

Coming up with a definitive smartwatch recommendation for people who use Android phones is tough. No matter which device you choose, you’re making a compromise somewhere. My advice is last year’s TicWatch Pro, which boasts good performance and excellent battery life despite some clunky additions to Google’s WearOS platform. The biggest downside is you’re looking at about $350. Now the maker of that watch, China’s Mobvoi, has released two more budget focused watches; the Ticwatch E2 and S2 (for ‘‘express’’ and ‘‘sport’’ respectively). And while there’s a lot to like, there are also more compromises.

TIM BIGGS

Ticwatches barebones yet likeable: WEARABLES

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The base can take 30 times the amount of dust that fits in the robot, so you could potentially go months having your floors vacced every day without having to do anything (except making sure the floor is relatively clear).

The Roomba i7 and i7+ can map your home and remember how to get around.

iRobot’s latest Roombas, the i7 and i7+, shown off at a recent event in Tokyo, will be arriving in Australia in the coming months. Their key new feature: persistent mapping of your home. As the robot travels around slurping up dust, it draws a floor plan and uses a sensor to identify landmarks and objects. Unlike previous models, the i7 remembers this information, meaning it will learn the most efficient paths around your home over time.

So if you spill the cornflakes while getting ready for work, you don’t have to wait for the scheduled cleaning time or fire up the app; you can just ask a Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa device to ‘‘tell Roomba to clean the kitchen’’.

Clever little cleaner: ROBOTS

It’s not a wild assumption to say the data the i7 class collects is the kind Google, Amazon and other smart home companies would jump at the chance to tap into, as information about the shape, layout and contents of your home could be invaluable for all sorts of services and machines.

Robot vacuum cleaners aren’t a new concept, having been around for more than 15 years, but they have become astronomically more competent since the days of catching on rug fringes, running out of battery mid-clean and forgetting where they were. And the next generation of disc-shaped floor-suckers could bring some of the most important upgrades yet, including being more autonomous than ever and knowing exactly where they are in your home and where you need them to be.

The ability to map not only makes the robot quicker and more efficient but lets it integrate more closely with smart homes, as once its mapped your home you can label individual rooms via a smartphone app for targeted cleaning.

TIM BIGGS

This ability to recognise and remember rooms is a bit of a turning point, says iRobot’s chief executive and founder, Colin Angle. He expects that not only will the company’s future robots, including vacuums, mops and more, share information for more efficient and autonomous cleaning, but they’ll also get smarter over time. ‘‘Now that we have memory ... we can learn. If your robot got stuck, we can figure out where and not do it again. If there are areas that tend to be dirtier than others ... we could spend more time cleaning there,’’ Angle says.

Aside from the processing and imaging tech, the biggest hardware update is a change to the charging base. Previously, when the robot’s dust bin was full, a human had to clean it out. But the i7+ silently returns home, where the dust is (not so silently) sucked into a special chamber, then returns to its job.

seem like they were keeping track of my activity. Speaking of activity tracking, the watches follow their predecessors by including Mobvoi’s own suite of fitness apps, which mirror the functionality of Google’s. I’m sure can’t help performance. Overall the Ticwatch E2 is barebones smartwatch at a reasonable price. Adding $40 for the added durability of the S2 is a nice option, though the E2 feels plenty solid to me.

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Taste of the future - The Samsung Galaxy Fold

The problem is that the timing of Unpacked, just before the MWC tech show in Barcelona, and lack of visibility of the two phones everyone came to see, in hindsight comes across as the multi-million-dollar equivalent of posting “first” on a YouTube video. Samsung wasn’t quite ready to announce such significant products, but it wanted to get in before its competitors announced their own versions.

ALICE CLARKE

However, we don’t know how the phone feels to fold, how a two-centimetre thick phone feels in your pocket, if it’s comfortable to type on a 7.3-inch square screen, if things can get caught in the hinge, and who is going to buy a $3000 first generation folding phone. It’s safe to assume, though, that if implemented properly folding phones could end up being more significant than the introduction of the tablet.

The Samsung Galaxy Fold, providing a bigger screen, may be the next real step forward. Last week Samsung introduced five new phones, three new watches, a pair of true wireless earbuds, and new unit of measurement (the Galaxy Fit band weighs the same as a strawberry, apparently) at its Unpacked event in the US.

The S10 5G and Fold aren’t really the first 5G and folding phones (see the Huawei-Mate-X and Xiaomi Fold here - Ed), but they are the first that matter. I’m glad Samsung’s waiting to release them when it’s ready, it’s just frustrating that it didn’t hold the announcement too.

But while the Galaxy S10e, S10 and S10+ are great phones and a solid upgrade on the S9, the Galaxy Buds sound very good, and the Galaxy Active watch certainly exists, it was the things with no Australian release date which journalists couldn’t touch or photograph at the event that people were most excited about. 5G is the obvious next step for mobile communications. Faster is better, and with Telstra promising Australian customers that it’ll provide speeds up to 20 times faster than 4G, it’s understandable that everyone wants to get their hands on it. However, information about the Galaxy S10 5G in the briefings and the event itself was oddly light. We know it has six cameras, a 6.7-inch screen, and a 4500mAh battery (one of the largest ever in a smartphone), and it will only be available through Telstra to start with. We don’t know its storage capacity, or the battery life, given how many antennas are in it, or actual speed tests on Australian networks. Just that we can expect it some time before July.

The author traveled to San Francisco as a guest of Samsung.

The other, arguably even more exciting, phone announced at the event shows the next real step forward. Folding phones are how we’re going to be able to get bigger screens to multitask and one day replace tablets; perhaps even laptops. Folding a screen still seems a little like science fiction, it’s an exciting innovation we can see, touch and imagine we’re on the Starship Enterprise. Except Fold was another phone journalists couldn’t see or touch at Unpacked, beyond what we could see on the stage. What we do know is that it has an inner 7.3-inch screen and an outer 4.6-inch screen, it has six cameras, 12GB of RAM, a screen 50 per cent thinner than those of most other smartphones, and a very fancy hinge. And, much to my disappointment, we know that Samsung worked really hard to make sure there’s a seamless app experience no matter which screen you’re using, so you can’t actually hang up on anyone by angrily folding your phone.

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Fix is nearly instantaneous, and the Clone

tool is more responsive when working on

large images. You now have control over

how often the program will autosave your

work in progress, with a default that

interrupts your workflow less often than

before.

The PSP supports just about every graphics and photo file format, including more than 100 RAW file formats. And it continues to maintain compatibility with popular tablets and styluses. including the newest Wacoms, WinTab, Windows Ink and others.

Part of PSP's value proposition is its large library of content. It's added to the many scores of brushes, color palettes, gradients, patterns and picture tubes.

The PaintShop Pro is something of a combination of Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Like Photoshop, the PSP software is powerful and creative enough for sophisticated photographers and demanding business graphics users. And like PS Elements, the program is easy and accessible enough for novices. The PSP is also a great learning platform for those who want to graduate from the latter to the former, and it has a far larger library of clip art and other content.

Other incremental improvements include an extension of the Crop tool floating ribbon to provide quick access to the One Step Photo Fix, six popular filters (such as low tone map, retro sepia, and skin smoothing) and a depth-of-field tool. Unfortunately, the depth-of-field tool restricts the center of focus to one of nine grid positions. It would be far better if the user could drag-and-drop the circle of focus anywhere within a composition.

Content galore

Corel has added to the many scores of brushes, color palettes, gradients, patterns and picture tubes in PSP 2019.

Unfortunately, the PSP is available for Windows only, with no Apple version planned.

The Ultimate package represents quite a bargain. In addition to the PSP program, it includes PhotoMirage Express (converts an image into an animation), Painter Essentials 6 (for digital painting and drawing), Perfectly Clear 3.5 SE (auto photo fixes), Corel AfterShot (RAW photo editor and batch processor) and Corel Creative Collection (even more content,

including 100 royalty-free backgrounds).

Bottom Line

Prices and packages

While the incremental upgrade may not be compelling for existing users (unless you have a camera capable of 360-degree capture), we highly recommend considering the PSP 2019 for new users.

Credit: Tom's Guide

by Aug 28, 2018, 8:52 AMSally Wiener Grottawww.tomsguide.com

The PSP comes in two packages: PaintShop Pro 2019 for $79.99 ($59.99 upgrade), and PaintShop Pro 2019 Ultimate for $99.99 ($79.99 upgrade). These prices are very competitive with Photoshop Elements ($99.99). And unlike the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription model for Photoshop

(which requires you to renew it annually), all purchases are for a perpetual license, with no recurring costs.

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PaintShop Pro 2019 Ultimate for $99.99 ($79.99 upgrade).

PSP comes in two packages:PaintShop Pro 2019 for $79.99

($59.99 upgrade),and

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