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For some years now, Paint Shop Pro has been considered the poor person's Photoshop. Its extensive range of tools is hardly rivalled at the lower end of the image-manipulation market, making it a popular choice among many home web and print designers. For the first time it's also available in a UK English version.
Although there are more than enough tools for creating your own images within Paint Shop, particularly through the use of the vector tools and new gradients and textures that can be applied to fills and strokes, much of the package is geared more toward editing pre-created bitmap images, and particularly those captured using scanners and digital cameras. Version 7 introduces automatic colour balancing along similar lines to that found in Photoshop, but with the addition of presets for sunlight, fluorescent lighting and a variety of lighting sources between 2500K and 9300K.
Perhaps the most useful new feature is the red-eye removal tool, which covers up unsightly red pupils and replaces the discoloured cornea with one you select from a dropdown range. This not only covers human eyes, it also includes colours for dogs and cats. It even maintains the reflected light source, leaving some life in the picture.
There's a scratch removal tool that impressed us when Jasc showed a demo of it, but when we put it to use in our own images its most noticeable effect seemed to be a general smudging of the surrounding area. We did manage to wipe some buildings off the London horizon with it, and take some supports out of a couple of bridges, but it was less impressive than we had hoped.
Photoshop users will welcome the new histogram adjustment function that works just like the one in Adobe's professional product and had been a notable omission from earlier Paint Shop releases. Sadly, though, the solar flare (or as Jasc calls it 'sunburst') is going to fool nobody.
Looking more like the second coming than sunlight caught in a camera lens, it lacks any ring of truth. Unfortunately, many other effects are just as disappointing, and we couldn't help wondering if the reason some of them were there was to create impressive marketing stats.
Heavy users will welcome productivity enhancements such as the simple arrangement of multiple images on a single page, saving costs when using expensive photo paper. There's also a batch-processing command for converting mixed format images to a single file type - useful if you're converting whole directories for use on a website.
We were very disappointed with the woefully inadequate web optimisation tools that serve their purpose but are a long way off being user friendly.
Image slicing takes place in a dialog box rather than the standard interface, so you don't get to see the whole image you are working on unless it is very small. Two solutions are offered - either pan the image, which doesn't solve it so much as move it to another part of the image, or zoom out, which does little to help you achieve an accurate result.
There is also no way of easily seeing with which parts of the image you have associated a URL, such as the alternate colouring methods of Fireworks. The rollover creator relies on you having already generated the alternative images for your mouse-states and then hunting around your drive for them. Many comparative packages allow you to generate the alternate states on either associated layers or frames.
Animation Shop 3 is bundled for quickly creating internet-friendly animations, and we liked the way you can save your Paint Shop desktop so that the next time you come back to it all your open images and palettes will be in place. Version 7 sees many new tools that Jasc is no doubt hoping will eat away further at the lower end of Adobe's market. To this end, it now even opens and saves Photoshop files with all layers intact.
When you get down to seriously comparing the products head to head, though, Photoshop comes out top once again. Take the price into consideration, though, and Jasc still earns itself a four-star rating. Its hugely unfriendly web tools deny it five stars, but at this price you're still getting a great bit of software for which you could quite reasonably expect to pay far more.
Contact
Digital Workshop 01295 258 335www.digitalworkshop.co.uk
See also:
This edition of Photoshop 'Lite' offers home users exceptional value for money. 27 Aug 2002
Paint Shop Pro's little brother is very affordable and crammed with useful features. 11 Jul 2002
Quite simply the best photo editing program in the history of the universe. 15 May 2002
Image-editing software that not only lets you manage, correct and enhance photos, but also allows you to create and publish many types of images. 11 Apr 2002All Image Editing & Management
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