Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8

If you are a keen photographer, Paint Shop Pro's wide range of filters will appeal to you.

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Price: £99.95

Manufacturer: Jasc

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Verdict

Pros:
Powerful scripting and photo-retouching tools.

Cons:
Cluttered interface; complex for beginners.

Overall:
Paint Shop Pro provides a great deal of power at a fairly low price, but its interface and ease of use could definitely be improved.

Cliff Joseph, Personal Computer World 06 Aug 2004

Highly Commended - Personal Computer World.

Paint Shop Pro is a little more expensive than most of its mid-range rivals, but it's the most powerful of all the photo-editing programs in the sub-£100 category.

It can look a bit intimidating initially, as it throws an awful lot of tools at you when you first launch the program. In fact, it helps to have your screen set to a resolution of 1,280 x 1,024 or higher in order to fit all the options onto the toolbars that run across the top of the screen.

Unlike most of the other programs reviewed here, Paint Shop Pro doesn't have an initial Welcome screen to ease you into the program. You're thrown straight into the main editing workspace, which is awash with toolbars and palettes. There's an odd mixture of simplicity and complexity, with automatic time-saving tools sitting next to buttons that activate complex menus and dialogue boxes. It?s good that the program attempts to cater for both beginners and more advanced users, but the end result is a somewhat chaotic interface design.

Fortunately, among those many palettes is the Learning Centre, which contains a series of tutorials for beginners. There's also a Product tour option in the main Help menu, which contains a brief video tour of the program's main features. You're probably going to need those at some point, because it takes a while to get to grips with the program's everything-but-the-kitchensink approach.

The toolbar on the left of the screen contains basic editing tools including Select, Crop, Paintbrush and Text. The arrangement of tools can be a little odd and we spent some time searching for the Zoom tool until we located it in a submenu beneath the Pan tool. Something as important as this ought to be right up front and immediately visible.

Running across the top of the screen is a context-sensitive toolbar that changes to provide extra options for the tool you actively have selected. This sometimes requires a daunting degree of precision and control, with multiple options available for each tool. Fortunately, there's generally some sort of preset option available so that you don't have to delve too deeply straight away.

Running above this is yet another toolbar containing a number of retouching controls. The Enhance Photo button provides quick access to a number of automatic adjustments, including red-eye removal, contrast, and colour correction. Next to this are a number of more complex tools, including filters to correct various types of lens distortion, and tools such as histograms and manual colour correction, which require more technical expertise than the average home or business user is likely to have. Photoshop Elements provides similar features but its more tightly organised interface keeps them tidily out of the way.

Finally, this toolbar also provides a series of controls for recording and using your own scripts - predefined sets of commands that you can automatically apply to any image. You can also use scripts to batch-process multiple images simultaneously, perhaps using a single script to prepare an entire collection of photos for use on the Internet. Ulead's Photoimpact has some simpler macro options, but Paint Shop Pro's scripting makes it the most powerful program in this price range.

It's also got a good set of special effects filters and tools for creating web graphics. Our only real complaint about the program's toolset is the rather clunky Text tool. This forces you to type into a special box in order to update the text in the main workspace, which means you have to keep looking from the main workspace to the text box to check that the copy is being edited properly.

Even so, Paint Shop Pro still provides excellent value for money. It's certainly a match for Photoshop Elements and its scripting tools provide the sort of workflow automation that only the full version of Photoshop can match. However, its interface is rather ungainly and it does lose points for the sheer difficulty of getting to grips with it.

Contact: Digital Workshop 01295 258 335
http://uk.jasc.com

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