I used to love PaintShop Pro. I even used it when I worked at Adobe back around 2002. Of course my manager freaked out when he saw me using it: "But... You work for Adobe!"

I explained that I would happily use Photoshop if it would just do the one thing I really wanted: load several photos that I shot in a burst and then let me cleanly flip back and forth between them to pick the best one (most in focus, best facial expression, whatever).

I could load a few photos into either Photoshop or PaintShop Pro and then flip between them with Ctrl+Tab, but Photoshop would draw the notorious gray and white block pattern and slowly trickle the new photo onto the screen replacing the blocks. PaintShop Pro simply flipped instantly from one photo to another, so I could easily compare them with no distraction.

I'm sure Photoshop has gotten better since then (I hope). But PaintShop Pro got worse. Besides selecting the best photo, the other main thing I did was cropping. This worked fine back in the day, but then a bug crept in where selecting the crop tool would reset your display zoom level! This was not good when I was trying to crop precisely.

I dutifully reported this to Corel, and the response was that if I wanted to file a bug report I needed to pay for a support incident.

I didn't need support! I just wanted to tell them about something that used to work perfectly and now failed in the new version, along with easy instructions to reproduce the bug.

Still, I paid for a version upgrade every year in the hope that they might have noticed this problem and fixed it. Eventually they did (I think).

Adding insult to injury, every time I upgraded it lost my custom keyboard shortcuts and I had to re-enter all of them. There were only a few of these and it only took a few minutes, but still it was a pain.

I sent in another suggestion that they should adopt standard browser zoom shortcuts with some extensions:

  Ctrl+Plus: zoom in
  Ctrl+Shift+Plus: zoom in more (5x)
  Ctrl+Minus: zoom out
  Ctrl+Shift+Minus: zoom out more (5x)
  Ctrl+0: reset zoom to 100%

Never heard back on this one or saw them in the product, so I kept re-entering them every time I upgraded. Maybe I won't bother upgrading again, so I won't have to mess with it. That seems like the easiest solution.