Digital Home Thoughts: Corel's Paint Shop Pro Photo XI: A Minor League Slugger

Touching on Object Creation
Every graphics program has to at least let you draw stuff, and Paint Shop Pro is no exception. It has pen tools and paint brushes, crayon tools and chalk tools, square and circle tools and, of course, text creation, all of which I found to be pretty standard. One cool thing I did note is text is (naturally!) treated as a vector object, and thus is much easier to manipulate than in a regular image editor, though I did find it annoying that text has to be entered into a pop-up box even though it’s clearly being generated in real-time on the image. Why couldn’t I have just typed it on the image directly?


Figure 14: Help! There’s a pile of cars in the bushes on fire! This took about 90 seconds to draw using the Picture Tube tool.

The Picture Tube tool is one that follows the 80/20 rule: It’s 80% annoying and 20% useful. Using the Picture Tube, you paint on images of various things that are defined within a Picture Tube file like a rubber stamp. For example, a Picture Tube file could contain 5 different pictures of fire, or trees or cars. By choosing the fire, tree or car Picture Tube file, you either click to place one image or click and drag to place many randomized images. The effect is supposed to be that of a large fire composed of small flames or a forest composed of many trees or a car pileup composed of the same 5 cars. OK, so the cars one doesn’t seem too useful, but there have been many times I could have used that fire one. They also have two grass ones that could be useful. What would be really cool though, is if they allowed us to easily make our own Picture Tube files, maybe ones that had 20-50 different pictures of flames or trees (there is a way to save one image as a Picture Tube, but I don’t find that too helpful).