Paint Shop Pro Version 7.04 Anniversary Edition

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Manufacturer: JASC
Price: £46.97 inc VAT ($74 US)
Requirements: Pentium or compatible PC, 32MB memory, 75MB hard drive space, 256 colour adaptor, Win95, 98, NT4, W2K, ME, XP
Web Site: WWW.DIGITALWORKSHOP.COM (US: WWW.JASC.COM)

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INTRODUCTION
JASC labels this software Paint Shop Pro 10th anniversary edition. Wow, is it ten years since it first launched its software. Here at the INQ we still regularly use version 2.01, a lean tool for capturing and converting graphics files.

Paint Shop Pro has come a long way since those days - it now has a feature set that easily rivals Photoshop. We reviewed version 7.0 back in June.

Paint Shop Pro, asides from being a graphics editor, comes with a number of bundled other products including a product that organizes your graphics files, an animation product for spiffing up your Web site, and a heap of special effects and filters.

FEATURES
After installation, you're given the option of which file types will be associated with Paint Shop Pro. It's a pretty extensive list, some of which are ticked by default, and the file formats include Amiga .iff, Autodesk .dxf, Compuserve .gif, CGM metafiles, Corel clipart and drawing files, Deluxe Paint .lbm, Dr Halo .cut, encapsulated Postscript, Gem Paint, HP graphics files, JPEGs, Kodak files, Lotus .pic, Macintosh .pct, MacPaint, Micrografx Draw, Microsoft Paint, Photoshop, portable bitmaps, greymaps, network graphics and pixelmaps, Raw files, Scitex files, SGI files, Sun raster images, TIFFs of various kinds, Targa files, Ventura drawings, different Windows graphics files, OS/2 .dib files, Wordperfect bitmap and vectors files, and Zsoft files. Whew.

When you open a file, you can choose to preview the pic before you open it - a useful feature which works faster than some other products we've tried and gives you width, height and colour information.

Here's what the screen looks like just after we loaded a picture of Intel's next processor - the Prescott. Or is it the UK deputy prime minister, John Prescott? Both are under NDA.

As you can see, there's plenty of iconese to wrestle with here - you can switch these off in the Preferences screen if you want, as well as tweaking the undo system, changing the units you use, remove warnings that might annoy you, and change the way images and palettes are viewed.

When there's an image loaded, you can use the "Effect Browser" to preview how Intel's future chip looks when you apply them, without committing to the changes. This is a nice feature - here's Prescott with something called CurlyQs (no relation to Carly or Curly). There's a large number of these special effects available, including one called Aged Newspaper, which we think we understand only too well... You can also design and add your own effects to the dozens that Paint Shop Pro provides.

If you've a digital camera, this software has a number of features to automatically improve the image. These include auto colour balance, which uses a menu that lets you choose between warmer and cooler images, auto contrast adjustment (pictured below), and auto-saturation adjustments.

A number of options let you convert your pictures to grey scale, colourise them, split the image into different colour channels, decrease or increase the number of colours used.

There's also a set of options which lets you create new raster or vector layers, while the objects menu lets you make images the same size and align them.

The masks menu lets you create and edit masks for images for specialist image manipulation.

There's a series of drawing and painting functions - which you can see on the left of the main screen, allowing you to crop, to paint, to pencil in, to spray to fill, and to add text and other features to your existing images. You can also zoom in and out to further tweak your images.

As well as putting frames round your pictures, you can also add "watermarks" to them. This is a useful feature if, for example, you've got a fantastic shot of a brand new Alpha chip and you want to prevent other people from just nicking it for their own sites. You can include copyright information, choose whether the watermark will apply to monitors or to print, mark it for restricted use, and add other attributes to the pic. This tech is provided by Digimac - you can add your own URL to the picture by registering with the Digimarc web site.

µ HOW EASY IS TO USE
While Paint Shop Pro has come a long way since it was first introduced, the designers seem to have managed to cope with the complexity of the additional features of the package rather well. Photoshop, for example, is a different kettle of fish in the learning stakes, although the cut down version, Elements, which we'll review shortly, is much easier to handle.

As well as a very extensive help file - perhaps too extensive sometimes, the product comes with a number of tutorials, as well as the online lightbulb tip of the day feature, which you can switch off, thank heaven.

The full packaged product comes with a massive 500 page manual outlining all the features, while there's a slimmer Getting Started guide too. Good marks for the clarity of these documents too.

Digital Workshop provides a human help desk if you get stuck included in the package.

CONCLUSION
If you need to manipulate graphics and add them to a Web site, as we need to do all the time, this is a nifty tool which will come in very handy and doesn't need you to spend hours learning esoteric features.

Its support for different file formats is, quite simply, excellent. We've tried out the animation software bundled with this product and this too is easy to use and offers a number of different effects if you want to spin that Penguin or that Prescott.

You can try out this product before you buy it, and download it from the Web sites at the top of the article. µ

INQUIRER SCORE
8/10 useability, 8/10 value for money, 8/10 features, 7/10 WOW factor, 8/10 for documentation and support.