To signal the venerable Paint Shop Pro's shifted emphasis from image creation to digital photography, Corel has tacked on the word Photo, creating Paint Shop Pro Photo XI. Call it what you will, the application remains an excellent choice for those seeking Photoshop-like powers at a Photoshop Elements price, although Corel Photo Album is no longer bundled with the product. For managing and sharing your digital photo collection, a new addition, Organizer, takes up some of the slack. The feature is a resizable, dockable palette that's integrated with the Paint Shop Pro program rather than being a separate application like Photoshop's Bridge or Photoshop Elements' Organizer.

Organizer has all the image-browser basics: raw-format support, scalable thumbnails, searching, keyword capabilities, a rating feature, metadata editing, and an instant slideshow creator. A nifty innovation lets you save still images from frames in video files. Snapfire Plus SE, a form of the $39.99 (direct) Snapfire Plus, also comes with Paint Shop XI. For the first 30 days, it has all the capabilities of the full version. After that, if you choose not to buy it, the functionalilty reverts to that of the free downloadable version (plus some project templates). On the whole, this shift in image-management strategy makes the product less an editing and organizing package, like Photoshop Elements, and more a straightforward image editor with some built-in organizational features.

Luckily, image editing is where Paint Shop Pro has long shone. But while the program's formidable power is undiminished in version XI, the new editing features don't bring a lot to the table. When used on typical multi-megapixel photos, the Skin Smoothing command is so sluggish you might feel yourself aging as it fixes skin tone and wrinkles. The Depth of Field command emphasizes the photo subject by softening the background focus, but it offers little you couldn't achieve in any image editor by isolating the foreground and blurring the background. The Depth of Field feature is also pokey and gives you only a freehand lasso tool for selecting complex foreground objects. On the plus side, though, the new Color Changer tool does an amazingly good job of recoloring image objects with a single click (and maybe a little tweaking of the tool's sliders). The Levels and Curves commands and the Crop tool have also been given helpful enhancements.

Printing professionals will want to stick with Photoshop, and those in search of a versatile editing/organizing/sharing solution are better off with Photoshop Elements. But Paint Shop Pro Photo XI retains the formidable image-editing power of its previous incarnations. The product nicely fills its distinct niche as a robust program for beginners and experts alike, offered at a very affordable price.