by J. Kolenovsky
Did you ever admire and like the 1957 Chevy? I did, but was too young to drive one. That's about the same with good software. Sometimes they just get better and better. That's especially true about Paint Shop Pro 5.0 by JASC. These folks have been good from the git-go and are getting better. I first started using PSP (Paint Shop Pro) three years ago. I did my first website with PSP 3.0 and a text editor. Their 4.0 version was better and now their 5.0 release is simply superb. I stopped and talked to these folks at Fall Comdex 1997 in Las Vegas and they are real nice folks to talk to.
PSP can hold its own weight with Adobe Photoshop and digital-photography hobbyists will find it a significant rival to Adobe PhotoDeluxe and Microsoft Picture It.
It has the ability to cater to the novice and expert alike and at a decent price. Its photo-retouching programs supports TWAIN-compliant digital cameras and scanners. It has direct interface support for the Kodak DC40, DC50 and DC 120 digital cameras. (I just bought a Minolta D-Image Pic digital camera and it interfaces with it as well). It handles 40 types of file formats. One of its most outstanding features is its support for maskable layers. The Layers tool renders image composition and manipulation by allowing one to adjust each part of an image separately and not affecting the others.
The Masks tool determines which colors are transparent and allows other layers to show through. Another prominent feature is PSP' s unique Brushes and Picture Tubes, which can assist you in creating complex images for backgrounds. Brushes let you select, tweak and paint. Picture Tubes paint a series of images. You can get additional tubes from the JASC website.
Something I really like is the Animation Shop, which lets you create animated GIF images along with a Palette tool and a 216 color-palette.
PSP' s painting tools include a complete collection of drawing and painting tools including paintbrush, pen, pencil, marker, crayon, chalk, charcoal and airbrush. The Picture Tube brushes allow one to paint with realistic graphic elements. Image areas can be easily cloned and painted. A Text tool allows you to place lines of text on any layer. A powerful eraser lets you edit your last paint operation.
With Layering, one can create composite images with multiple layer support while using blend mode controls, layer grouping, transparency locking, and merging/flattening layers together to combine elements.
The Selection tool allows regular, freehand, point to point and smart edge while easily adding or subtracting from selected areas. There is a matting option that defringes and removes black or white mattes.
PSP' s Image Adjustments are mind-boggling. There are 99 levels of undo with a viewable history. There are retouching tools that let you sharpen, soften, smudge and emboss. The on-screen adjustable cropping works real well. (I took a PCD image and cropped it and placed it on a webpage with no effort). PSP can resize images and the options are smart, bilinear, bicubic and pixel sizing. PSP's Image Enhancements offer deformations such as circle, cylinder, pentagon, pinch, punch and skew. Standard image filters include Gaussian Blur, edge, noise, sharpen, dilate, emboss, erode, hotwax and mosaic. The Color Support has full control over brightness, contrast, highlight, midtone, shadow, HSL and RGB values. You can preview all adjustments before applying them. You can apply custom palettes to multiple images and create CMYK color separations.
The Internet graphics support includes transparent GIF, progressive JPEG and PNG formats. The Utilities has a built-in screen capture that allows you to capture elements with "hot key" activation and a Microsoft Explorer-style thumbnail browser finds and identifies graphics files effortlessly.
I could go on and on, but there is too much. One criticism - the help files were not particularly useful. There is no animated tutorial (the program is 7.3 megs in size) and this product can be feature-overkill.
BUT, its all there if you need it or just want to play with it.
J. Kolenovsky is a HAL-PC member, a Director and leads several SIG's on a monthly basis. He can be reached at garden@hal-pc.org n
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.