Corel Photo & Video Bundle
Posted by Kathleen Maher on March 19th 2010 | Discuss
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True to its heritage, Corel has released a powerful set of tools for photo and video professionals in its Photo and Video Pro bundle. Corel disrupted the drawing and illustration market by adding a broad range of tools in Corel Draw including raster to vector tools and most recently dimensioning and other tools for professional users (we’ll talk about CorelDraw in an upcoming review).
In the case of the new bundles the company has been releasing for its video and photo products, you can argue that Corel is late to the party but the Photo & Video Pro Bundle is a deceptively modest package jam packed with some of the best technology in Corel’s portfolio. It includes tools from Paint Shop Pro products, Ulead products, Painter, and for good measure it’s added a simple application for creating photo books, calendars, cards, slideshows and uploading creations to Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube. It follows on Corel’s Digital Studio 2010, a similar product for the consumer market introduced in October 2009.
Although the company has had this technology in its portfolio a long time, the Digital Studio and the Photo & Video Pro Bundle are first products for the company in the way the tools have been put together, and because of Corel’s brave new work on its Interface design. Corel has tried to give its users the best of both worlds—easy to use, push button tools for fast edits, creating projects, uploading files, sharing, etc. but all the depth needed for professional photo management, editing, and image processing.
Overall, Corel has done a good job. However, some tools don’t work as expected and the job of integration seems incomplete. Corel has added plenty of information sidebars that offer users clues about using a tool. The effort is to be applauded, but all that text is daunting, and it’d be nicer to have tools and interfaces that are predictable. As an example, the Organizer window shows information about a file in a right hand dialog, but you can’t actually change the file’s name there. You can change the file’s name by right clicking on the image. Well, hello? There’s no dialog about that little surprise underlining the fact that you can’t anticipate every question a user might have but you can do a better job of anticipating what they might obviously want to do. This is the sort of thing that can easily be improved with user feedback and we have no doubt that Corel will continue to fine tune. The company has a history of paying close attention to its users.
The professional photo software market almost requires the addition of organization tools, but now that everyone offers one, which one do we use? Corel automatically catalogs images and it references the images where they are—it doesn’t move anything. The process takes a while if you have a lot of photos, but once everything is cataloged the program starts up fast and is responsive.
The organizer is the heart of the Photo tools with tabs that jump quickly to Express Lab or the Full Edit tool. There are suggested changes and plenty of sliders to fine tune changes. Corel has added some favorite tools to the Express Lab tab from its consumer products. It has added the Makeover Tool that gives you brushes to improve skin tones, whiten teeth, and even a “thinify” button to discretely take away a little Christmas poundage. (Oh, if only there were such a button in real life.)
Once changes have been made you can capture an edit and apply it to other images in the organizer, which brings up the question of non-destructive editing. Corel saves the original file so that even if you save edits you don’t lose your work. You can always revert to the original. You can unless you capture edits and apply the script to other photos. Then, for some reason they’re burned in and you can’t go back. Corel warns you that you’re heading down a one way street but it’s an awkward workflow. Really, you want to be working in a non-destructive environment or you want to be aware that your photos might change forever. One tends to lose faith if you can’t count on total non-destructability.
One thing Corel has not fixed is its annoying habit of making itself the default viewer for video and photo files. I had to go back and fix this after installing the Corel Media Studio and now I have to do the same with Photo & Video Pro. Let me make myself clear, Corel does not offer a choice, it just changes all your preferences so that image files open in Corel Instant Viewer even if you have set up Adobe Bridge, Google Picasa, Adobe Lightroom or some other product as your viewer of choice. Professionals may use several products because they like certain filters or a particular interface for a task, but they never, ever want programs to mess with their default viewers and settings.
The inclusion of Painter Essentials is a nice touch but it’s too bad that it’s not better integrated with the Photo Pro product. It’s separate and it doesn’t show up in the Photo Pro organizer window in a tab like the Express Lab and Full Edit tools. It would be nice to work on a photo in Photo Pro and then switch to Painter Essentials to add some painterly touches or create a full-blown painting with the product. You can edit images you’ve painted over in the Photo Pro tool and it shows the original file and the painting in separate layers, so the integration at least works in one direction.
I love Painter Essentials. As I have written in these pages before, I’m just not talented enough or patient enough to painstakingly paint a photo and make it amazing in the way many professional users are—there’s even a business creating faux paintings using the Painter technology with good printers and textured paper. So, for the untalented, the tools in Painter Essentials offer the best of both worlds—the ability to choose settings and paint over an image using tracing paper until you get the desired effect and also an automatic feature that lets you choose your settings and just press start—then you have the fun of watching your “painting” emerge. You can stop the automatic process at any stage and you can go over areas with a brush to strengthen the effect and put your own stamp on it.
In the coming weeks we’ll provide a review of the Video tools from Corel as well. The Photo & Video Pro Bundle sells for $149.99.
Pros: Corel has brought together some of its most useful tools and features in one convenient bundle and at a very attractive price point.
Cons: In spite of a friendly-looking interface, some features don’t work as you’d expect. It really seems like a 1.0 product and we have high hopes for the updates.
