Selective Focus would be useful for mimicking the function of your camera’s aperture setting, except that it doesn’t allow you to draw a precise selection around your subject before applying it. Like a depth-of-field tool, the new Selective Focus option enables you to specify an area of your image that should be in focus the tool feathers the selection and then blurs the rest of the image. It worked best for me when I drew a selection around my primary subject and then opened the Vignette tool, because trying to draw a selection in the tiny dialog box was difficult. With it, you can create a neat “Hound of the Baskervilles” look.
Vignette allows you to select the primary subject of your image, then blur and darken the areas around it.
The Edit mode houses a few interesting new features. In my tests, it worked about as well as the Shadows command elsewhere in the Adjust mode–which, by the way, is paired with a useful Highlights command (for toning down blown-out areas of your image). The Adjust mode includes a new Fill Light tool, which is supposed to brighten only the primary subject in your image, rather than the entire image. Often these tools have overlapping capabilities. PaintShop Pro is littered with other “one-step fixes” that are obviously aimed at novices but it also has many more-complicated tools that come with gazillions of settings. But since purple fringing is usually due to chromatic aberration–though it may be the result of other factors–I’d say that Corel could safely have combined these tools. For example, in the Edit mode, the One-Step Purple Fringe Fix and the Chromatic Aberration Removal are located next to each other. Sometimes, similar tools appear in the Adjust and Edit modes, or even within the same mode. The Adjust mode doesn’t allow you to toggle before-and-after views of your edited image, but the Edit mode usually does. Changing from one mode to another isn’t like starting up a new application, as it is with Adobe Photoshop Elements 10, but you still have to wait while PaintShop Pro X4 shifts things around, and the application makes you save your image between mode changes.
PaintShop Pro X4 has a revised interface, with three large workspace tabs across the top of the screen: Manage, for photo organization Adjust, a lead-me-by-the-nose editing mode and Edit, which provides a vast array of manual image-editing tools. That’s not to say that Corel hasn’t tried to put things into some semblance of order.
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