Paint Shop Pro

PaintShopPro is a fully functional painting program that supports many of the features of PhotoShop, but at a substantially lower price. A trial version is available. See http://www.jasc.com/

I've used various versions, and have been quite pleased with the (non-graphics professional) results. --DaveSmith

Often GoodEnough kills off better products. Most people claim that PaintShopPro is more than GoodEnough, yet here is one area where it doesn't seem to have killed off the superior PhotoShop.

PaintShopPro and PhotoShop have a bit of overlap in their target markets, but not so much overlap that one can "kill off" the other. PaintShopPro doesn't serve the ink-on-paper market, and PhotoShop is priced out of the reach of many of the people who are targeting the web.

My personal view is that PhotoShop survives (thrives even) because it is used in a professional market, where a reduction in the time to do a job is directly related to increased income. Back when I worked in DigitalPrepress? you noticed this sort of thing when companies would have the choice of (taking an example) 3 new Macs - 600MHz @ $2000, 800MHz @ $2500 and 1000MHz @ $4000. They would buy the $4000 machines because they could get the job done 20% faster, and this meant that they could make 20% more money. The machine make back their cost in a fairly short time - if the companies could have bought a machine going at 1500MHz for $8000 they would have.

When you think of 99% of what people do with computers in business, there is no relationship between the work they do and the money their company makes - perhaps you are one of them, in which case the idea of paying a lot more for a little increase in speed would seem counter-intuative at first.

For the non-professional market GoodEnough is fine.

PSP also has grown more complex since earlier versions. If somebody is going to take the time to ride the learning train, they figure they might as well go with the "industry standard", PhotoShop. It is more "resume-able". Perhaps PSP is making a mistake by trying to be PhotoShop. They may be better off targeting amatures by reducing the learning curve instead of a FeatureWar with PS.

I rather agree with this, sort of, as I too found that it was getting too complicated for simple stuff. It does have some nice capabilities, but I feel that smaller specialized applications might be a better approach. I quit acquiring new versions of PSP back at 7.02. However, my Photo Shop program is much older and is used by me much less then PSP.

PaintShop? Pro 9 ups the ante now moving well beyond GoodEnough particularly in ease of use which should save pros and amateurs alike a lot of time (and money in the pro's case) with the ability to save state for all filters/effects and adjustments/corrections unlike Photoshop which grants this privilege to only a few filters and adjustments. Likewise the new Art Brush takes PaintShop? well beyond the best that Photoshop has to offer. For photo distortion corrections, PaintShop? Pro either matches or in several cases exceeds Photoshop. Interestingly, Photoshop with CS takes the lead away from PaintShop? Pro in image browsing and multi-image operations and maintains color modes and layering leads. I use both and just find myself in a reverse position - spending more time in Paintshop Pro then Photoshop CS. See www.thephotofinishes.com for more details. Jacques Surveyer, jbsurv@sportpics.ca CategorySoftwareTool

BTW, thephotofinishes.com is not friendly to 600x800 screen resolution.