Trilight Zone

[digital8]

By Tito Dasgupta <tito@freeos.com>
Posted: ( 2000-11-01 07:47:54 EST by )
Corel Photo-Paint is the well known image creation and photo editing
application. This great Windows application recently made the jump to
Linux version and is available as a free download. Does it match
up to Photo-Paint for Windows? Or should Linux users stick with GIMP?

Corel Photo-Paint needs no introduction. Photo-Paint has been competing
with Adobe Photoshop for some time now. While Photo-Paint has always been
a very capable program, but, it hasn't quite been able to match the
popularity of Photoshop. Its image creation and manipulation features are
very strong. So it was good news when Corel decided to the latest release,
Photo-Paint 9, to the Linux community as a free download.

Corel Photo-Paint for Linux can be downloaded here. Both RPM and DEB
packages are available. It's a huge 96 MB download which took over 8 hours
on my 56k modem. Since I was using Red Hat, I downloaded the Red Hat
RPM's. What you actually download is a tar.gz file which contains all the
necessary files in RPM format and not one large RPM.

Installation was fairly easy. First you need to untar the tar.gz
file. /tmp is a good location. It is better if you make a new
sub-directory and then untar there because there's are some 50+ files in
here.

cd /tmp

mkdir corel

Now it's time to untar the file here. The file would be named
CorelPHOTOPAINT9LnxRPM.tar.gz. Untarr'ing is a simple command. First
changes into the newly created directory and run the following command.

cd corel

tar zxvf CorelPHOTOPAINT9LnxRPM.tar.gz

This will create the proper directories and extract the files there. You
might want to read ReadmeFirst.html for more information.

Corel has provided a simple install script. You can also install it
manually as given in the Readme but the script is much faster and
easier. You will need to run the script from X though. If X was not
already running then start X and open a terminal window. Then change into
the directory where you untarred Linux and run the install script there.

cd /tmp/corel

./install

The install script will prompt you for the root password at this
point. Enter that and installation will begin.

Then the installation will prompt you for the Linux distribution that
you're running. The installation detected the distribution automatically
every time I tried it and worked across Red Hat, SuSE and Corel. The next
few screens you can just click through. There's just a license agreement
and a note informing you of the installation location.

After the installation is complete, a launcher will be created in the KDE
menu. You will have to restart the panel or login again to see the
addition to the menu. As an alternative you could just start it from a
terminal window. Just type 'photopaint'.

I tested Corel Photo-Paint 9 for Linux on a machine having with a Celeron
550, 64MB of RAM and a Matrox Millennium G200 AGP Graphics Card with 8 Mb
of Video Ram. The distribution used was Red Hat Linux 6.2 running the KDE
desktop environment. Corel Photo-Paint started up quite quickly on this
machine.

What will surprise you is the look and feel of this Linux port. It is
exactly like Corel Photo-Paint for Windows 95/98. The user interface
looks exactly like the Windows version. Everything you see in the Windows
version is available here. All the functions, tools, filters, effects.
The reason for this is that Corel used the Wine libraries to speed up
development of the Linux version. This is not a native Linux port. This
approach does speed up development but the downside is the performance.
The menus open a annoying fraction of a second later and scrolling
through the file listing in the browser is jerky and slow. Also every time
I dragged a window across the Corel desktop, CPU usage would shoot up to
the nineties. This behavior is very annoying as most of the time you're
waiting for the program to transfer control back to you.

But for these user interface issues, I couldn't make out any difference. I
could have been working with the Windows version.

Let's check out what Photo-Paint has in store for you. It has an effective
colour management facility for the optimization of graphic images. The
user can also create movies on Corel Photo-Paint 9 by creating the
individual frames and then putting them into a sequence.

Working on layers is a possibility on Corel Photo-Paint 9 which enables
the user to make minute changes, select certain areas of images for
editing and also the import and placement of other images on that image.

The default file extension of the file saved by Corel Photo-Paint 9 is
.cpt, but, the user can export as well and import images in the following
formats.

BMP - Windows bitmap
TIFF Bitmap
GIF - Compuserve Bitmap/Graphic Interchange Format
JPEG Bitmap for web and screen use
PSD - Adobe Photoshop Image
PNG - Portable Network Graphics (a new format used for the web)

I found the performance quite satisfactory, but I strongly recommend a
machine with 128 MB of RAM for smoother performance. Photo-Paint does
grab a lot of memory. You can limit this behavior in the options though.
A faster processor probably wouldn't help much. I tried out various
filters and various combinations of filter and they seemed to be applied
as fast if not faster than the Windows versions.

How does Photo-Paint compare to GIMP. Well GIMP is a lot lighter and
faster and can do just about everything that Photo-Paint does.
Photo-Paint is a very impressive application and it's very feature rich
but they really should have gone beyond the Wine route. I would really
have liked to give Corel a much higher score here but the user interface
issues really need to be fixed. I give it a rating of 6 out of 10.