Digital Home Thoughts: Paint Shop Pro 9 Reviewed

A Tool For Every Job
Not surprisingly, with all those built-in capabilities, one would need a massive set of tools (Figure 2). Anything from selection, to text, to painting, to objects and history - it almost necessitates a second monitor just to be efficient. Thankfully, these tools can be moved around, pinned/unpinned, and even hidden depending on your current needs (Figure 3).


Figure 2: The tools of Paint Shop Pro 9 (these can be individually docked and pinned as needed).


Figure 3: My normal tool configuration when using a single monitor.

Some tools give you multiple functions (such as History (Figure 4), Scripts, and Layers). For example, once you've found a set of tools/configurations that you would like to use on multiple images, you can use the History toolbar to save those steps as a Quickscript which then can be easily accessed later.


Figure 4: An example History (from the photo restore shown later in the review).

What really excites me the most about Paint Shop Pro 9 is the Scripting capabilities. There's nothing worse than preparing 100+ images for a website and having to adjust each one individually (even though the settings are the same). With the Scripting tool (Figure 5), this frustration disappears with what really amounts to a single mouse click. And if you don't care for a step that is included in the defaults, then you can edit it, step through it (skipping if you want), or even create your own. They even had the foresight (because the scripts are written in Python), to have Trusted and Restricted scripts - avoiding possible malicious scripts from doing naughty things to your computer while you aren't around.


Figure 5: The script tool with a smattering of the scripts included.

Seem a tad overwhelming? Well have no fear. Jasc has a great community section on their website (free downloads, forums, and newsletters) that complements the 502 page User Guide.