Amazon.co.uk Review
It's good to see that even mature applications can benefit from innovative thinking--Jasc has improved the latest
PaintShop Pro in several areas.
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 organised. Gone are the cumbersome floating palettes, a feature of earlier incarnations. The tool options palette, for example, is now a context-sensitive ribbon under the menu bar. As in the CorelDraw handbook, the colour palette and several others have been rearranged as dockers on the right-hand side of the screen.
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 dialogue, for editing on the left and preview on the right. After highlighting each eye in turn and selecting the colour and hue of your choice, 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, thus working particularly 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 if you want to convert a batch of files from one format to another or resize a series of images. --Simon Williams
Manufacturer's Description
If you have digital photos, this is the software collection for you. With Paint Shop Power Suite - Photo Edition, you'll find everything you need to edit, enhance, repair, organize, archive, and share your photos. Experience the ease of Paint Shop Photo Album, the power and flexibility of Paint Shop Pro, and the fun and flair of Paint Shop Xtras - Creative Edition. This collection provides you with the tools to accomplish any digital photography project you can imagine with amazing, professional results.