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The new Paint Shop Pro X3 is actually pretty nice to work with even though for the most part it’s the same as the previous version. There are a couple of things that I’m not really sold on though. First, the new text layer is more awkward than the previous way of doing things. It is a little more desktop publishing like in how you just type onto the image rather than into a dialog box, but selecting and making changes to that text after it’s been written is a little clunky to me. Maybe I’m just doing it wrong, but trying to reselect that text and then edit it again seems to take a bunch of different clicks in a bunch of different places. So far, I like how it used to work.

Second, I’m not sure if it’s a configuration issue or just how PSP does things, but it basically uses the tablet like a mouse. I guess I need to configure the brush variance, but most of the time it just acts like a pointer and doesn’t offer the functionality I would have thought. I did hook it up to a machine with Painter 11 and it behaved in a completely different manner, much more like I would expect. Like I said, maybe it’s a config issue.

The Express Lab looks somewhat interesting, but not sure that’s going to be something I use.

Overall it’s pretty good, but there are still quite a few features I haven’t used yet. The extractor tool is something that looks very interesting. I’m curious to see how it works.

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