There’s no way to hide the fact that a robust photo editing application is going to be a drain on your system’s resources. Without enough RAM and a decent processor, no image editor is going to perform well. Likewise, bumping up your RAM and upgrading your CPU will do wonders for your photo editing, no matter what software you’re using.
With that being said, some applications just seem to manage memory better than others. I haven’t analyzed all the benchmarks, but I can certainly tell from personal experience that Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 is far ahead in this category. The application starts up faster, processes edits quicker, and rarely hangs or crashes (except when I accidentally try to upsize an image by 20,000% instead of the 200% I originally meant).
I would say that PhotoPlus X2 is about average in this category, but sometimes it seems to take forever for Photoshop Elements 7 to load. I will admit that once it is fully loaded, it performs almost as well as Paint Shop Pro. However, if you do decide to go with Photoshop Elements, make sure it’s not your default picture viewer. While I don’t think twice about firing up Paint Shop Pro just to look at a photo that I’ve been emailed, I would never do this with the other two applications because of the slow frontload time.
Rankings for the Performance Category:
- Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate
- PhotoPlus X2
- Photoshop Elements 7
This may not be a category of interest to everyone, but if you do a lot of photo editing, you may eventually want to check out some of the powerful plugins that simplify or improve the functionality of the host editor. Most plugin developers create their product with Photoshop CS4 in mind and compatibility with other applications is a bit of an afterthought.
Since Photoshop Elements 7 is also an Adobe product, it generally has the highest degree of compatibility with the majority of available plugins. However, Paint Shop Pro is an extremely close second in this category since it’s not only compatible with most Photoshop plugins, but there are quite a few creative people out there who design plugins specifically for the Corel editor.
Unfortunately, PhotoPlus X2 is a very distant third here. While there are a few plugins compatible with Serif’s photo editor, most are fairly basic in nature. That’s a real shame since advanced plugins coupled with the other creative tools in PhotoPlus could make it a real force to be reckoned with in the battle amongst photo editors.
Rankings for the Plugin Support Category:
- Photoshop Elements 7
- Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate
- PhotoPlus X2
Continue on to the next page where we wrap up our comparison of these three top photo editors by looking at the user support and documentation available for each product. We also give our final recommendations on which application to purchase.