Friday, March 4, 2005
Paint Shop Pro 9 Reviewed
Posted by Tim Adams in "ARTICLE" @ 10:00 AM
Creativity Without Limits
When Jasc says that Paint Shop Pro 9 gives you "Creativity Without Limits", they really aren't kidding. Armed with a bit of knowledge and the right tools, you can accomplish quite a bit with this application. And I'm finding new things every day. Here are some examples:
First, a tool that I've been using almost non-stop, the One Step Photo Fix. It allows you to take any image (although it's designed for photos), and make it new and shiny in one single click (Figures 6 and 7).
Figure 6: Mr. Swimmy (the original image).
Figure 7: Mr. Swimmy after the One Step Photo Fix. Note the clarity of the water.
Taking the One Step Photo one step further, we use can use the Sloppy Edges script to create borders (Figures 8 and 9).
Figure 8: The original shot (Crater Lake)..
Figure 9: The Crater Lake shot, One Step Photo Fix, and Sloppy Edges border.
Of course, you can do more than just One Step Photo Fix and borders. You can even give your images an artistic feel by using one of the Artistic scripts or tools (Figures 10 and 11).
Figure 10: The original Grand Canyon image.
Figure 11: Grand Canyon image with Watercolor then One Step Photo Fix.
With a little elbow grease, you can even fix photos that have been damaged using the Scratch Removal and Clone tools (Figures 12 and 13).
Figure 12: The original damaged slide that I scanned.
Figure 13: After 30 minutes of work, Paint Shop Pro has helped me clean up the damaged photo ten-fold.
Conclusions
Overall, I found that I could deal with the slowness on most levels. It was still frustrating, but for the price, one can't complain too much. Jasc has released a great product with version 9 (especially with the inclusion of scripting), and hopefully there will be a patch in the future to really speed things up. Now I just need to find another monitor for all these tools...
