Paint Shop Pro 9

By Dale Farris, Vice-President Golden Triangle PC Club November 2004 General Overview You know what you want — something that’s going to let you create the image you have in mind. Whether it’s a photo, graphic, or digital art, Paint Shop Pro 9 is going to help you get that vision out of your head and onto the screen. Your pocketbook doesn’t have to suffer for your art and you don’t have to settle on the pricey standard for quality. What you need is right here. Jasc Paint Shop Pro has been described by experts to be very close to Adobe's Photoshop CS in functionality, yet it costs hundreds less. Jasc Paint Shop Pro is also much easier to learn than Photoshop, while including a ton of customizable editing firepower. PC World magazine says Paint Shop Pro is easier to use than Photoshop, with an excellent red-eye removal tool and good background manipulation features. Paint Shop Pro allows the user to work with multiple layers of the photo—this feature is common in better software, but not seen as often in less-robust software. Experts say it is easy to grow into Paint Shop Pro once you master the basics, as you are not confined to the wizard system for editing photos. While some software forces you to work only with a wizard (which takes you through a process, step by step), Jasc lets more adept users stray away from the handholding of a task wizard. About.com’s Sue Chastain includes Paint Shop Pro in her top two picks for both beginner and advanced editors, giving testament to the flexibility of the program. Chastain notes, “Paint Shop Pro feels ‘all grown up.’ The workspace has been streamlined and updated, there are new tools and effects, productivity enhancements, and personalized options.” Jasc includes several built-in effects tools from beginner to advanced, ranging from simple red-eye correction, to color and contrast auto-fixes, to an animation shop for creating animated GIF’s. The interface is not flashy, but it is capable of getting almost any editing job completed quickly. Anyone with an interest in digital photography and digital images will want to give serious consideration to this latest version of Paint Shop Pro. In version 9, Paint Shop Pro continues to impress with all its many, many features that are packaged in this very reasonably priced program. Customers who own an older version of Paint Shop Pro will also want to upgrade to this new version. Students learning digital image editing also can use Paint Shop Pro 9 to begin learning the many things that can be done today with computer images. The most significant news about this latest version 9 of Paint Shop Pro is the merger of Jasc Software, Inc. with the Corel Corporation. Corel now owns Paint Shop Pro and long time customers of WordPerfect and Paint Shop Pro will be delighted to learn that Paint Shop Pro will continue under the arm of Corel. What's New in Version 9? Your creativity has no limits, neither should your software. Paint Shop Pro continues to set the standard for affordable, professional image editing. Version 9 builds on Paint Shop Pro’s legacy of creative innovation with a new suite of Art Media features, professional photo editing tools, and precision graphic design capabilities. This version also features several industry innovations that greatly reduce time spent on production tasks. Edit photos, create graphics, draw, paint and animate, all within a highly personalized workspace environment. Photos Digital Camera Noise Removal Filter scans photos and removes image noise while intelligently preserving image textures. Chromatic Aberration Removal Filter eliminates the purple fringe that often appears in digital photographs. Fill Flash Filter corrects the underexposure of shadows. The Backlighting Filter compensates for overexposed areas. Raw camera images. Paint Shop Pro 9 includes integrated support for Raw camera images (digital negatives) from several popular camera models. Set custom white balance, exposure and sharpening levels when converting Raw camera images for use in Paint Shop Pro. Art Art Media tools include Oil Brush, Acrylic Brush, Chalk, Pastel, Crayon, Colored Pencil and Marker. Palette Knife and Smear Tool realistically mix paints on the canvas. The Art Eraser provides an easy way to remove paint from the canvas. A new Mixer Palette provides an off-canvas area to experiment and mix custom colors together. Art Media Layers allow users to adjust the canvas texture, lighting and paint wetness properties of their artwork. Use Image Tracing options as an easy way to paint a photograph or other image using realistic brush strokes. Graphics Rectangle and Ellipse Tools simplify buttons, banners and other custom graphics. The Rectangle tool gives full control over rounded corners for custom buttons. Symmetric Shape Tool allows users to create polygons and stars then edit them into custom artistic shapes. Users can edit shape properties at any time, not just at creation. The Text Tool features vertical text layout options and new anti-alias rendering choices that render cleaner text at smaller font sizes. A simplified Pen Tool makes it easier than ever to add lines and curves to graphics. The new Displacement Map Filter creates custom two- or three-dimensional surface effects for graphics based on an underlying image. Users can add spin, twist and zoom blur effects to images with the Radial Blur Filter. Productivity New History Palette tracks each command applied to an image, making it easy to manage complex editing projects. Powerful Selective Undo functionality allows users to easily undo any individual editing step in a document’s history. Save selected history steps to the clipboard or as scripts for use with another image. Resource Categorization: Users can now organize their Paint Shop Pro resource files by projects or subjects in flexible resource categories. New Text Options in print layout make it easier than ever to add custom captions and titles to photo layouts. A new Information Window in the browser allows users to view image details, creator information, and EXIF data for any selected image. Sort images in the Browser using EXIF data to find specific photos. Animation Shop 3 Paint Shop Pro 9 includes an additional program, Animation Shop 3. Animation Shop has high-quality easy-to-use creative effects, features, and optimization options for Web graphic designers of every level. Whether used as a standalone application or as a complement to Jasc Paint Shop Pro, Animation Shop gives you the ability to easily create buttons, banners, and other cool animations. Quickly create new and fun animations and banners with step-by-step wizards Easily position and edit animation frames in the Onionskin Preview mode Spice-up animations with professional-quality effects and transitions Easily optimize and save an animation for any destination, including the Web Included free with Paint Shop Pro 9! Targeted Customers With this latest version 9, Paint Shop Pro continues to impress with its extensive array of useful features that are all nicely designed in a very user-friendly design and priced very reasonably. While Adobe's Photoshop CS may continue to dominate the high-end, technical level of digital image editing, Paint Shop Pro 9 now combines more powerful features than ever and is certainly much less costly than Photoshop CS. Paint Shop Pro 9 has become a "heavyweight" in the digital image editing software market, and will definitely appeal to all customers who use an older version, as well as serve as an excellent entry-level program for those new to digital image editing. Once customers become accustomed to the power and functionality in Paint Shop Pro 9, I suspect most will be hard pressed to move to any other digital image program for any reason. System Configuration Requirements Minimum System Requirements Pentium 300MHz processor or faster Windows 98SE, 2000 (SP4), ME, XP 256MB RAM 500MB free hard disk space 16-bit color display adapter at 800x600 resolution IE 6 or later Recommended System Configuration 1GHz processor or faster Windows XP 512MB RAM 500MB free hard disk space 32-bit color display adapter at 1024x768 resolution IE 6 or later Additional requirements for selected features: Paint Shop Pro 9 includes integrated support for RAW camera images (digital negatives) from several popular camera models. Install and Setup Installation and setup should proceed with little problems, but if you have an earlier version of Paint Shop Pro and you do not wish to have 2 different versions, you will need to first uninstall the earlier version before you install this latest version 9. The install program in the new version will not automatically recognize an earlier version and ask you if you want to install it. Price $129 retail, shrink-wrap version $119 download version About Jasc Software, Inc. On October 14, 2004, the Corel Corporation, one of the industry's top ten packaged software vendors, acquired Jasc Software, Inc. This acquisition will yield real benefits to all Jasc Paint Shop customers. Corel intends to put the powerful R&D resources of the newly-combined companies behind the popular Paint Shop family, ensuring that next-generation Paint Shop products will continue to flourish. Also, Corel will continue to provide service and support to all Paint Shop customers. Their primary goal is to ensure that your critical needs are effectively met. Corel is best known for their graphics, office, and personal productivity solutions, including CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, the WordPerfect Office Suite and the Corel Painter natural media painting and illustration software. With the addition of the Paint Shop family, Corel can now provide you a complete migration path from the most basic photo editing, organizing and sharing, to image improvement and retouching, all the way to advanced image editing and graphics creation. Corel can offer you greater access to the most innovative, reliable, and affordable packaged software portfolio in the industry. Their products rival other brands in quality, performance and reliability – but at a much lower cost to you. Corel is thrilled to add the Paint Shop family to their growing portfolio of packaged software products and looks forward to meeting your business and personal software needs with this expanded range of affordable products. Also, you can rest assured that the combined development resources of Corel and Jasc will drive significant product innovation well into the future. Contact Corel Corporation 1600 Carling Avenue Ottawa, Ontario Canada K1Z 8R7 Corel Minneapolis, Paint Shop Pro 7905 Fuller Road Minneapolis, MN 55344 952-934-8888 FAX 952-930-9172 www.corel.com