Paint Shop Pro 9: A Digital Photographer's Dream Image Editor
Paint Shop Pro started life as a no-frills shareware program for no-frills image editing. These days it costs more than $20, but it’s also more than the cheapskate’s alternative to Photoshop. Paint Shop Pro 9 is a mature and very impressive application. Combining an extensive range of bitmap-editing tools with some nice vector drawing and animation features, this program is a steal at $119. There’s something for every PC user in here — general image editing, photo touchup, Web art, and new natural media tools for the artistically inclined. The list of additional features in version 9 runs four pages long, making the program a serious competitor to Adobe Photoshop. Now that Corel Corporation has acquired Jasc Software, Paint Shop Pro’s developer, perhaps the application will get newfound respect.
A Minor Facelift
Major improvements to the interface include a History palette that records every action you take while editing an image. Photoshop has had this feature for years, and it’s nice to see this addition. With the History palette, you can step backwards and forwards through your actions and save everything to a script to replay at another time (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: The New History palette lets you retrace your editing steps, delete selected actions, save them to scripts, and apply them to other open documents.
Another new feature that I really like is the ability to arrange open images in tabs at the top of the workspace. You can easily scroll through the images with the backward and forward buttons — a much nicer way to wander through multiple documents than using the Window menu command.
Paint Shop Pro has 10 palettes, and the workspace can become so cluttered with little boxes that it becomes impossible to do any actual work. Version 9 adds the ability to roll up palettes and pop them open or closed via a single click to save valuable screen real estate.
A few minor improvements, such as the ability to associate a script to an icon and a more convenient Mixer palette for creating and mixing colors, make the interface easier to use.
We admit to being bewildered by one change listed in the docs: “What was labeled the Layers palette in previous versions is now called the Layers palette.” Sounds like an improvement that originated in the Department of Redundancy Department.
Fix Those Pix
Frankly, I was awed by Paint Shop Pro’s digital photography features. Some photo buffs will be pleased to see support for Raw camera formats (unprocessed, uncompressed data), but the collection of filters for touching up and reviving flawed photos are worth the price of the program. You’ll find filters that: remove noise; remove chromatic aberration; add fill flash and backlight; and correct distortions such as pincushion, barrel, and fisheye. Other functions will fix color; correct faded photos; improve clarity and contrast; and repair defects such as speckles, JPEG artifacts, scratches, and redeye.
To give you an idea of the how good these filters are, look at the two images below (See Figure 2):
Figure 2: Before (top) and after (bottom) running the Clarify filter.
On the top is an unretouched photo of a stingray taken in the murky waters of Thailand last summer. The photo on the bottom shows the result after running the Clarify filter twice. Notice that the edges show none of the pixelated artifacts you would see if you used a standard sharpening filter.
After you’ve tweaked your image, you can add captions and frames, arrange batches of photos in a template, and prepare images for Web graphics via image maps, rollovers, and slicing.
Brushes and Pencils and Chalk, Oh My!
The biggest news in Paint Shop Pro 9 is the addition of natural-media brushes and surfaces. In reality, most serious digital artists use Corel Painter, usually in conjunction with Photoshop — a costly combination that’s complex to learn. Paint Shop Pro’s new art media tools are an inexpensive way to experiment with digital artwork. It supports basic media types such as oil, chalk, pastel, crayon, pencil, and palette knife, and all were surprisingly responsive (see Figure 3).
Figure 3: You won’t find an overwhelming abundance of natural media tools in Paint Shop Pro, but they aren’t bad for quick sketching.
Unfortunately for Paint Shop Pro, I was reviewing Corel Painter 9 at the same time I was writing this review, so although I thought the new features in Paint Shop Pro were nice, they just couldn’t compete with Painter’s astounding breadth of features and exquisite sensitivity. Paint Shop Pro lacks a watercolor brush and its cloning — that is, morphing an underlying image by painting with natural brushes on a layer of “tracing paper” — wasn’t very easy to work with. However, for simple effects, the new tools are pretty good.
Learn by Reading
We don’t often comment on documentation, but the manual that ships with this package is exceptional. Unlike many manuals that simply give the steps required to carry out a task, this one tells you why you might want to use a feature and explains in detail exactly what you need to do and why. For example, The Chromatic Aberration Removal section describes what chromatic aberration is, what causes it, and where you might be likely to notice it in your digital photos. Each option for the filter is clearly explained so the user can understand exactly what the parameters do. The book is also filled with little sidebar nuggets that make for interesting and informative reading. The 502 pages might seem daunting, but beginners will find the contents provide a complete and enjoyable short course in bitmap and vector editing.
In many ways, Paint Shop Pro is more versatile than Photoshop and we found the program’s easy accessibility and flexible vector/raster capabilities a treat. You won’t find good vector drawing tools in Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro’s array of picture-fixing filters make the program much more useful to the casual digital photographer than Photoshop.
In fact, with a single major exception (working in CMYK), Paint Shop can do just about everything Photoshop can and quite a bit more. We think this program is a terrific alternative to Photoshop, particularly for digital camera buffs who want to quickly fix pictures, add captions, and rig up simple Web pages.
This article was last modified on January 3, 2023
This article was first published on November 16, 2004
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