The New Corel PaintShop Pro 2020: From Bad to Worse

The new PaintShopPro 2020 just appeared and there is a free 30-day download. As many ThePhotoFinishes will know, this editor has been looking for a replacement for AdobePhotoshop as Adobe has failed to honor its contract with Photoshop and CS2, Cs3, CS4 And CS5 users. Rightnow the best replacement to date has been Autodesk’s Pixlx online PhotoEditor.

So when the Corel ads appeared hope springs eternal, I decided to try PaintShopPro 2020 despite a bad experience with PaintShopPro 2019[Hint,here are the tags for that review: Corel PaintShop Pro 2019, deceptive advertising, poor program support, very limited support for many classic photo plugins]. PaintShopPro 2019 Stumbles Badly was the overall verdict.

What made things Bad for PaintShopPro 2019 was  not just the loss of the ability to use many of my two dozen, carefully accumulated photo plugins  but was also the need to learn a new layout of PaintShopPro 2019’s workspace – lots of subtle and other times slavish changes to the workspace layout. So readers can imagine  the enthusiasm when encountering the new PaintShopPro 2020 layout:

Uggh where is everything? Now this is not good news – a whole new workspace layout and no idea or hint for how to change to the familiar PaintShopPro 2018/2019 interface. Instead users will have to cope with this documentation fortress:
So now I still do not know a)how to manage the PSPRO 2020 interface or b)whether the support for photo plugins has been restored to former glory. In general all the photo editing tools are getting more complicated with substantial retraining and learning curves. Now clearly Corel is targeting PaintShopPro 2020 to upgraders. The last things this group wants is a new learning curve.  However if Corel pays me for the significant amount of retraining work involved [$40/hour * 6 to 10 hours equals $240 to $400CAD], I shall gladly take on the chore; otherwise, PaintShopPro 2020 gets a No Sale sign.