The Plugin Site

Unfortunately Corel discontinued PhotoImpact, so there will be no future releases of it anymore. PhotoImpact is a dead end.

I hope I still get the following facts right: In the early 90ies Ulead developed an image editing tool which they sold to Aldus, that was then named PhotoStyler. A bit later Aldus was acquired by Adobe and some of the PhotoStyler stuff was added to Photoshop. So you could say that Photoshop and PhotoImpact have a few roots in common.

Over the years Corel acquired several promising companies with image editing tools, e.g. Micrografx, Jasc and Ulead. Unfortunately that mostly meant that their image tools were discontinued, except Jasc's PSP, which is still sold by Corel, but is only a shade of what it could have become. Actually Adobe also acquired several companies, but they somehow managed to better integrate the acquired software into their product line.

I think that shortly after Adobe bought Aldus, Adobe's right to Photostyler was challenged. Aldus did not have the right to sell it because they were only licensing it.

Corel ruined Paint Shop Pro - I believe they acquired it because it was competing with their Painter program. The are molding it into a photo processor only and taking a lot of the old stuff out. In X2 (and I assume X3), you CAN add back in some of the missing commands, but if you are just starting up with the program, you won't know they are missing. One of the things they took out was the manual color change. I put mine back in. Had they allowed Jasc to continue in the direction they were headed, Paint Shop Pro would have really challenged Photoshop. Many PSP users quit using PSP at 9 which is the last version Jasc put out. Others have continued on and have reported contacting Corel to urge them to keep it going.

I heard from them that they are not continuing Animation Shop (they don't support it for Vista), and they are letting Kang's go as well as Ulead. They said that they MAY work on Vista and Windows 7 but they will not provide support.

I personally think that they intend to let it all go and keep only their main stuff. Paint Shop Pro won't be anything close to Photoshop - it will compete with Photoshop Elements. Which is a real shame because the potential IS there. They seldom even advertize it. There was an "Official Magazine" in England, but I think it folded, and it was probably due to Corel not supporting them. But then, Word Perfect Office isn't anything like Microsoft office either. Corel had the potential to be a contender in a lot of areas but they act like they don't care.

If you can find Animation Shop, it DOES run on Vista. I haven't tried it on Windows 7 yet. More than likely the issue will be an incompatibility in the install files which is what I ran into in another plugin that I ended up buying (I forget which one), but had to use a cracked version to install it. That problem was that when you went to install the file, you'd get an incompatable error message and it refused to install. I turned to a lesson list I was on to find out what the issue was and someone sent me a cracked version. I was able to install it, and then bought the license since I don't violate copyright. I was able to put my own license number in and it was ok, but it was a real mess. (It was that or rebuild my old computer and reinstall Win98 just to do a lesson.)

I will never buy anything Corel puts out because of what they did to PhotoImpact. It was an excellent program for the price, and I still use X3 for everything. See my gallery here:
http://www.rgbstock.com/gallery/xymonau
Not all the images are wonderful, but PhotoImpact is such an easy-to-use editor, and it was perfect for those who needed something simple to learn, but with professional capabilities.
I refuse to support large companies who go around buying out smaller ones just to destroy them. Getty (iStock, etc) is another company who does this, although for micro stock sites, not editors.

RE: Help Files

Microsoft quit supporting the older versions of help files but has a file down-load
that allows newer versions of windows to read these files.

I went to Microsoft's web page and searched for help file or help file reader to find this
information for another program that I had.

Hope this helps !

It is rather odd why paint shop would not get any updates already while it is still in the market. Yes, the software gets some mini upgrades but it only makes up for usability and not with editing power. This is one of the reasons why I transferred to GIMP, though it still does not provide me with the full line I would need.