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Paint Shop Pro 8 Power Suite, Reviewed by Maureen Shannon, NJPCUG
For a full review of Paint Shop Pro 8 with full color images, please visit our web site, www.njpcug.org , go to SIGs>Graphics SIG>Reviews, you will find a complete review of PSP 8 along with flash tutorials and other items you may find helpful. (www.njpcug.org/graphics/reviews.htm )
Paint Shop Pro 8 is a completely revised product. If you have used it before, you will not recognize it when you see this new application. Everything has been changed from the tool icons, to the palettes, to the tool arrangements. Many new features have been added and it now has a more professional look to it. I must confess I never found anything unprofessional about any of the other versions I had but now that I have become accustomed to it’s totally new look and redesign, I am very happy with it. Even the file extensions for the default PSP image save, the tube files, etc. have been changed. Paint Shop Pro is also one of the most stable applications I have ever used. I have never had any kinds of problems with crashing or features that didn’t work. It has always been reliable and I have pushed it to its limits with nothing but excellent results. Paint Shop Pro is, and to me has always been, a joy to work with. It is uncomplicated enough that the newest of image editing users will have no problems understanding it but it is very powerful as well. Those of us who are more demanding will be completely satisfied with it. It contains many high end tools and features that are easier to understand and use than in other more advanced or challenging products. Version 8 has also added much more support for working with digital images. One of my favorite new tools is the mesh warp tool found in the deform tools flyout. When used with a light touch, a less than perfect photo can be dramatically improved. I have used it any number of times to fix photos of family and friends that suffer from droopy eyes and eyelids, a mouth with a not so satisfactory expression, and other things that spoil an otherwise nice photo. With a few lifts here and there, you can perform instant “digital plastic surgery”. These small adjustments can make a dramatic improvement to facial expressions. There’s a flash demo of how I did this to an old photo of yours truly that was in need of lots of repairs. It is an old photo……I’m 18, my face is freckled, I have red eyes, my mouth is hanging open with that startled deer in headlights look…the original is not a very flattering photo! But with a few clicks, I fixed the mouth and widened my eyes, plus I removed the red eye, whitened the whites of eyes, deepened the green color, (we tend to squint at flash bulbs – and it was flash bulbs back then), plus I evened out the skin tone and got rid of the freckles. I used Paint Shop Pro 8’s red eye tool to remove the red eye and enhance the green color of my eyes. It offers a large selection of shades of eye color to choose from. (If you haven’t seen PSP’s red eye tool, you’ll love it. I’ve never seen another tool to equal its features! It even corrects animal eyes.) Support for digital images in this version is terrific. As is the way in which it now handles plug-ins. Plug-ins are essential to enhancing and/or correcting image problems. Prior versions required creative methods to add all of your plug-ins and have them recognized. Now it links to additional directories and lists all of the plug-ins alphabetically and adds a numerical number of lists so that you can access them all. It works great! This same method works for adding multiple tube directories too. And I have a lot of them added to my Paint Shop Pro tubes. Jasc has a variety of tutorials that will teach you how to work with both the basic and advanced tools and features of Paint Shop Pro 8. Use this link to find a selection of very helpful and informative tutorials on Jasc’s web site: http://www.jasc.com/support/learn/psptutorials.asp You will also find other resources there. Aside from the digital image support, Paint Shop Pro is also a terrific design application. My all time favorite feature is the “tube” tool. It uses “sprayed images” or pictures to paint an image from an expandable list of objects. Their attributes can be adjusted to make the tube image smaller or larger, etc. Working on layers for complete creative control, you can start with a background and build all kinds of fantastic designs. Practically every image used on our web site has had some kind of “picture tube” dabbling. Tubes are available from many sources, free on the internet to collections available for purchase. I highly recommend DigArts collections for Paint Shop Pro (www.gardenhose.com). They are without a doubt the best tubes I have ever worked with. The have all natural foliage ranging from from flowers, leaves, trees, to mind blowing palm trees. (Review and tutorials for the Palm tubes available in my Graphics SIG section – www.njpcug.org/graphics/reviews.htm) I will give you a fair warning that picture tube painting is highly addictive and a wonderfully creative way to design scenes. There are so many new and noteworthy features along with all its other features that you should know about. They include: Creative Image tools: Create collages, distort images, special effect filters, Convert an image to dots (halftone), wrap around a path or object, take screen shots (capture), batch processing, Create and edit scripts or use preset scripts, magnify lens effect, text tool, pen tool, selection tools; For Images: Align a crooked image, Reshape distorted images, erase backgrounds, One click fixes for common problems (such as red-eye), professional style color adjustment tools; Tools to repair and enhance photos, special effects, hand tinting, view, download and manage images, share photos through print, email or online; browse images and effects; Artistic Tools: Paint with solid colors, textures, patterns, gradients; the stylus from a digital tablet can be used a paint brush; paint with Picture Tubes; Preset shapes; An integrated learning system; Web Images: Create seamless backgrounds, Web tools add light, shadow, 3D effects, slice images, optimize images, create rollover effects, hot spots, or animations, choose from over 100 one-click special effects; Customize the look and layout the workspace and tool palettes to suit your personal needs or chose from preset workspaces; and free technical support. Photo Album 4 is an application that you can use to organize, enhance, and share your digital images. It has tools that will not only enhance the quality of the photos but will add a variety of favorite effects such as a sepia tone. Photo Album can be used to archive your photo collection too. It will allow you to search your images by date or other image information. Photos can be archived to CD’s too. Share photos by email, print them using included templates, or create a slide show on a video CD and then watch it on your tv! When the Power Suite Photo Edition was released, Photo Album 4 was the current version. In the past few weeks, Photo Album 5 Deluxe has been released. It has new features and includes templates from the Xtra’s Scrapbooking collections. Xtras 1 & 2 for Paint Shop Pro 8: The Xtras have additional tubes, frames, masks, textures and patterns. The tube selection is very nice. It has some beautiful nature tubes that include mountains, trees, water and waves. These tubes can be used to create very realistic and beautiful nature images. They can be further enhanced with special masks too. These two packages are very nice add on sets for Paint Shop Pro. Also available on the Jasc web site are other Xtras editions that are used for digital scrapbooking! They are full of great artwork to enable you to make fantastic digital scrapbooks. (The earlier editions are still available. I found them on eBay through the original vendor. They were made for version 7, it was the current release at the time, and the items included are very similar to the new release except that in the earlier release there are tutorials. One tutorial shows you step by step how to create a beautiful scene with mountains, water, a shoreline with waves lapping on it, and trees using the tubes that are found in the Xtras collection.) With the Paint Shop Pro 8 Power Suite Photo Edition and your digital camera, you are ready to go with all the tools and features you will need to work professionally with your photos. Whether correcting, repairing, enhancing, or making albums (for yourself or to share) it’s all here at your fingertips. Work easily and efficiently with Paint Shop Pro 8. As a long time Paint Shop Pro user, I can recommend it without hesitation for all level of users. This is an outstanding product. Paint Shop Pro is the affordable answer to image editing. PSP Requires a Pentium processor or equivalent, Microsoft Windows 98SE, NT4 SP6, 2000 SP4, ME, or XP; 128 MB of RAM; 700 MB of hard drive space, 16-bit color display adapter at 800x600 resolution; Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher; Macromedia Flash Player. *Jasc has an add-on plug-in application called Virtual Painter that can be installed to the Effects menu. It has the best paint and drawing effects that I have seen. It’s fully customizable and offers a dozen paint or drawing effects to your images. (Review also available on our web site with a flash demo) |
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