Digital Home Thoughts: Paint Shop Pro 9 Reviewed

Features, Features, And More Features
All I can say is, wow. Even coming from version 7, version 9 is quite a different beast (in both good and not so good ways). Features abound in every nook and cranny. And because there are so many new features in this newest version of Paint Shop Pro, this is the slowest running version that I've used. But more on that later. First, let's go over some of the major changes in this latest release (taken from Jasc's site):

Photo

• Digital Camera Noise Removal Filter scans photos and removes image noise while intelligently preserving image textures;
  
• Chromatic Aberration Removal Filter eliminates the purple fringe that often appears in digital photographs;
  
• Fill Flash Filter corrects the underexposure of shadows. The Backlighting Filter compensates for overexposed areas;
  
• Raw camera images. Paint Shop Pro 9 includes integrated support for Raw camera images (digital negatives) from several popular camera models;
  
• Set custom white balance, exposure and sharpening levels when converting Raw camera images for use in Paint Shop Pro.

Art

• Art Media tools include Oil Brush, Acrylic Brush, Chalk, Pastel, Crayon, Colored Pencil and Marker;
  
• Palette Knife and Smear Tool realistically mix paints on the canvas. The Art Eraser provides an easy way to remove paint from the canvas;
  
• A new Mixer Palette provides an off-canvas area to experiment and mix custom colors together;
  
• Art Media Layers allow users to adjust the canvas texture, lighting and paint wetness properties of their artwork;
  
• Use Image Tracing options as an easy way to paint a photograph or other image using realistic brush strokes.

Graphics

• Rectangle and Ellipse Tools simplify buttons, banners and other custom graphics. The Rectangle tool gives full control over rounded corners for custom buttons;
  
• Symmetric Shape Tool allows users to create polygons and stars then edit them into custom artistic shapes. Users can edit shape properties at any time, not just at creation;
  
• The Text Tool features vertical text layout options and new anti-alias rendering choices that render cleaner text at smaller font sizes;
  
• A simplified Pen Tool makes it easier than ever to add lines and curves to graphics;
  
• The new Displacement Map Filter creates custom two- or three-dimensional surface effects for graphics based on an underlying image;
  
• Users can add spin, twist and zoom blur effects to images with the Radial Blur Filter.

Productivity

• New History Palette tracks each command applied to an image, making it easy to manage complex editing projects;
  
• Powerful Selective Undo functionality allows users to easily undo any individual editing step in a document’s history. Save selected history steps to the clipboard or as scripts for use with another image;
  
• Resource Categorization: Users can now organize their Paint Shop Pro resource files by projects or subjects in flexible resource categories;
  
• New Text Options in print layout make it easier than ever to add custom captions and titles to photo layouts;
  
• A new Information Window in the browser allows users to view image details, creator information, and EXIF data for any selected image. Sort images in the Browser using EXIF data to find specific photos.

And that's just the "New Features" for version 9! While I doubted that Jasc intended to imply this, but with the current splash screen (Figure 1), it screams of slowdowns galore if you intend to run this application with anything else (reminiscent of another widely used digital imaging package).


Figure 1: The introductory splash screen for Paint Shop Pro 9.

Thankfully, subsequent loads started much faster than the initial startup. I did experience some overall slowness while using version 9 with other applicatoins that I never experienced with version 7. But, as a wise (ha!) Microsoft rep. once told me, people want functionality, and functionality increases bloat. Don't follow this line of thinking Jasc! We want fast, non-bloated, AND functional.