Corel Paint Shop Pro vs Paint.NET

Corel Paint Shop Pro (PSP) is one of the more popular raster and vector graphics editors available in the market today. This general-purpose image editor has a reputation of being the "poor man’s Photoshop" since it provides a significant portion of Photoshop’s capacity for less cost. This software costs around $100, but you can get it at a substantial discounted price.

If PSP is the "poor man’s Photoshop," then Paint.NET can be considered as the "poor man’s PSP." Originally developed as a student project at the Washington State University, this free raster graphics editor has grown from a simple substitute to the Microsoft Paint program into a powerful editing program with support for blending, plugins, layers, and transparency.

Here are some of the similarities and differences between the commercial PSP and the open source Paint.NET.

Features

Both Corel Paint Shop Pro and Paint.NET feature selection editing, layers, histogram, retouching, and resizing. They also feature noise removal, sized printing, sharpening, color correction, and support for plugin. However, there are some features present in Corel but absent in Paint.NET, such as HDR, lens correction, and image library. In addition, scripting feature is present in Corel but is partially developed in Paint.NET.

Color spaces

Corel dominates Paint.NET in terms of color spaces, Corel has basic support for sRGB, Adobe RGB, indexed, grayscale, and CMYK but partial support for LAB and HSV. On the other hand, the open source software has full sRGB support, but does not feature Adobe RGB and LAB. Moreover, Paint.NET has partial support for indexed, grayscale, CMYK, and HSV. 

File support

Corel and Paint.NET support RAW imports, BMP, GIF, JPEG, JPEG 2000, PNG, and PCX. The commercial editor also supports TIFF, PSP, and OpenEXR, but not XCF. It also has partial PSD support. On the other hand, the freeware has support for HD Photo, but not for PSP, XCF, and OpenEXR. This open source software has partial TIFF and PSD support.

Operating system support

There is no difference, however, in terms of operating system support. Both Corel and Paint.NET only run on the Windows platform, but not on Linux, Mac OS X, Unix, BSD, and AmigaOS.

Image Source: Wikipedia

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