Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm an avid Photoshop/Lightroom user, but I like to examine other products that can improve my workflow and digital retouching. Photoshop is a great program, but simple changes are often time-consuming. Lightroom, while great 95% of the time, does not do everything for me. With that, when I saw that Corel released PSP X3, I was compelled to examine the product. I've tried PSP in the past with mixed results, but thought I would try the new X3 version through the 30-day free trial available on Corel. I immediately had several problems. My machine is a workhorse (8GB, Phenom II X4), and while loading pictures into the catalog during initial startup, the software completely crashed multiple times on me. Okay, not off on a good foot, but I finally got my pictures loaded and began playing with some of the editing features. The menus were a little obtuse, and sometimes it is not easy to find editing options through the Full Editor. The Express Editor, while a little bit better, also had settings that were a little too deep in the menus. This is not really a flaw, though, since with a little bit of use I got fairly comfortable with the options. I noticed that the presets in PSP X3 were really good and that I can really make a photo look good with less work (time) than I would need in Photoshop for the equivalent output. However, my gripes are as follows: *Buttons for commands are really outdated and look rushed. They don't flow well with the rest of the program and they are somewhat hard to click consistently. *Product clearly wasn't tested with any level of depth. On any given hour, PSP X3 will crash at least once, which is unacceptable, especially given that I've run this on such a powerful machine. *The histogram isn't what you'd expect to see if you're used to Photoshop or looking at your camera's histogram. It could use some improvement. *In one case, the white balance in "Express Editor" is completely inverted. While the function works, it registers 2000 as "warm" and "7500" as cold, when it should be reversed. This isn't a big gripe and can easily be fixed, but demonstrates the lack of testing. *No LAB color mode. This isn't a big surprise, since PSP has never supported this, and truthfully, only a small fraction of people probably use LAB, but I'd like to see it eventually since it is a big part of my workflow. *MY BIGGEST GRIPE: When you edit a photo and go back to the library (Organizer) view, it always puts your cursor back to the first photo of the library. For example, you have 250 photos from your kid's birthday party. You look at them in the bottom organizer panel and pick #115 to edit. If you close #115 and go back to Organizer, it will not remember your place, so the view will start from photo #1. There is really a lot of potential here that could easily shine with a patch update. However, given Corel's history with X2 and X2-Ultimate, I don't expect them to address these issues anytime soon. If they fix a majority of these problems (name product stability and the Organizer issue), then I'd recommend it, especially for the price.