Paint Shop Pro 9 review

It is too easy to think that digital imaging is a one horse race, with Photoshop as the undisputed leader when it comes to professional image manipulation work. But this comes at a price, Photoshop is not by any means a cheap package and just upgrading to the latest version can cost more than other competing packages. Paint Shop Pro (PSP) has been around for a number of years, it started out as a shareware application and now in version 9 it has matured into a full featured application that can do most of the things that Photoshop can and many more as a bonus. I have written about PSP and produced many video tutorials on it, so I was particularly interested to see how this latest version compares and more importantly is it as good as Photoshop?

Paint Shop Pro has a plethora of new features which are well documented on an a set of Quick guide tutorials (Help > Learning Centre or press the F10 key). Unfortunately the animated tutorials that were in version 8 seem to have been dropped. However, many of the basic image editing tasks are covered and in many cases they will automatically carry out the task for you, should you be stuck.

 

Daunting, yet easy to navigate interface

The interface.

The workspace for any imaging application is crucial to productivity, you need to be able to access the tools you want quickly without having to hunt around. Paint Shop Pro supports many shortcut keystrokes, e.g. press the letter “C” to instantly select the clone tool, “B” for the brush tool, “M” for the move tool etc., These keystrokes are worth learning as they will help you to work faster. You can also define your own custom Keystrokes for often used menu items, in the screen shot I have defined Ctrl+Shift+Alt+G to convert the image to Greyscale – a handy stroke if you are an octopus. PSP’s fully customisable interface, means you can design it to your own preferred way of working. You can also create tool palettes for specific tasks, handy if you only want to do retouching or maybe vector drawing. Once you have customised your palettes you can save the workspace, this can be recalled by going to the menu and selecting Workspace – Your-saved-space.

Create custom toolbars	and custom keystrokes, you can print this list too

 

By default the palettes are docked to the edges, but these can be dragged away and they become floating palettes, which more often than not get in the way of any work your trying to do. You can set the palettes docking options so some will dock and others wont, I normally turn the Layer palettes docking option off and use it as a floating palette. Each palette also has an Auto hide feature, once activated the palette collapses as you move the cursor away and opens again when the cursor hovers over it. A new feature is that when the auto hide is applied to a palette that is docked it collapses to a tab at the edge of the frame.

Open images can be displayed in a tabbed format across the top of the workspace. This feature has to be set from the menu Window > Tabbed Documents command. To make an image active, click the desired tab. When many images are open, use the forward and backward buttons to scroll among the tabs. This frees up the workarea for image manipulation.

Palettes

The materials palette has a new frame tab which makes a lot of sense, the outside frame is the hue selector, click on the desired colour and the central area becomes the gradient selector. Now you can either click on the shade you want or by using the small triangles on the bottom and right side edges, move them to the desired numeric value. The foreground and background swatches can be a solid colour, gradient or texture. The Overview palette is a quick way to navigate to any part of the opened image, just click on the spot you want or drag the marked area to your location.

Easy to use colour picker and Frame tab	Navigate your image quickly
Layers palette with stacks of options	History palette is versatile

The Layers palette is much the same as on previous versions of PSP, with the exception of the new Art Media layer. You have to use the new art media tools on this layer. The art tools include, Oil, Chalk, Pastel, Crayon, Coloured Pencil, Marker, Palette knife, Smear and Art Eraser. These art tools simulate traditional artists tools and the colours will blend into each other or build up with repeated strokes, clever stuff but you can't beat the smell of turps. Using the layer blending options and canvas textures with this layer will produce some spectacular results, I particularly like the trace feature, this picks up the colours from the underlying layer and creates a simulated masterpiece from your photographs. The History palette keeps a track of everything that has been done and you can go back to any point. I like the Quickscript feature (green arrow on image above), this memorises the history on the image and can be applied to another image. The only limitation is that when you save the Quickscript, it overwrites the previous saved Quickscript. You can of course save your histories as a normal script and recall this at any stage on any image. This is the same as actions in Photoshop.