Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 [OLD VERSION]
by Jasc Inc.

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Software Summary

Software Reviews of Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 [OLD VERSION]

Customer Review: PSP8 and PSP7: A Comparison
Summary: 4 Stars

Compared to PSP7, PSP8 offers several advantages. One of the biggest is that on complicated images with multiple layers, it no longer takes several seconds to do simple operations like flood filling. The general performance of the painting component is much faster than before. PSP8 also brings with it a new interface more akin to Photoshop. It is much cleaner and more compact. There is a ton of information right at your fingertips now in centralized locations instead of scattered across various floating menus. Indeed, the whole package is a lot more organized than before.

There are other minor new features that are nice additions. One great addition is the emergence of a freehand pen tool that allows you to more easily draw with the mouse by smoothing any curve you draw (similar to Macromedia Flash). The sensitivity is adjustable. There are also a few new special effects. Another new function is scripting. For all of those tedious graphic manipulation tasks where you find yourself doing the exact same thing repeatedly, you can automate routine actions using scripting. Again, another great idea. Previous in PSP7, Jasc offered automatic color, contrast, and saturation enhancements for any photograph. Here, they've integrated them into the "one step photo fix" feature that, as advertised, tries to fix an entire picture in the push of a button. To my surprise, it works remarkably well.

However, there is a negative side to PSP8. It has a host of strange quirks and bugs. Perhaps thanks to the rewrite, some parts of PSP8 are unstable. While the program doesn't crash per se, it doesn't function like it should in some cases. In several cases, I've observed the Undo function breaking completely or even undo'ing the wrong portions of the image. In another case, a saved file did not save correctly when using the PNG exporter. And yet the worst part is that these bugs are rather nondeterministic. They occur sometimes and not others. Without a doubt, PSP8 would have benefit from more testing as even with the most recent patch installed, it hasn't earned my trust yet unlike PSP7.

If you can tolerate the quirks, however, you gain a significant increase in speed when dealing with complex multi-layered images. It's a toss, really. If you're like me and you deal with such images, you might deal with the bugs and enjoy the speed increase. For the casual user, though, I would be cautious recommending this one over PSP7.

Description of Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 [OLD VERSION]

PaintShop Pro is one of the original graphics editors, stretching back over 10 years. This latest version of the program features a new interface, which is more logically organized. Gone are the cumbersome floating palettes, so much a feature of earlier iterations. The tool options palette, for example, is now a context-sensitive ribbon under the menu bar. Lifting a leaf out of the CorelDraw handbook, the colour palette and several others have been rearranged as dockers on the right-hand side of the screen, too.

The painting engine itself has been rewritten, to give smoother control over your brushstrokes and it's now quite possible to do delicate work with the mouse, where before a graphics tablet might have been necessary.

Several new tools have been introduced and others have been enhanced, so they?re equally useful to the casual photo retoucher and the professional digital artist. A couple of examples are the red-eye removal and erase-to-background tools. Red-eye removal calls up a two-pane dialog, for editing on the left and preview on the right. After highlighting each eye in turn and selecting the color and hue you want it to have, the result can be a very natural looking pair of irises.

Erase-to-background enables you to paint away any part of a photo and leave just the unpainted parts as a foreground image. It's more intelligent than a simple eraser and detects line edges, so works particulraly well on high-contrast subjects. Other new tools include warp and mesh warp brushes

A major new productivity feature is the scripting recorder, with which you can teach the program a task and get it to repeatedly run that sequence of operations. This is ideal, for example, if you want to convert a batch of files from one format to another or resize a series of images. --Simon Williams, Amazon.co.uk

Transform snapshots into beautiful photographs with automatic enhancement tools, professional correction filters, and powerful retouching brushes. Design graphics from scratch or use preset shapes and effects to enhance your presentations or Web pages. Record common tasks as automatic scripts for easy image editing. Print photos in a variety of sizes and layout templates. Use the integrated learning system to help you deliver superior results with power and ease.

Photo Editing Software

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