Product Reviews

To many PC users, image editing is a simple matter of correcting a bit of red-eye in their holiday snaps - something that's easily achieved using one of the budget photo programs bundled with most digital cameras or scanners. But what if you want more than that? Then, the range of products available falls into two distinct camps. For professional graphic designers, there's the all-singing, all-dancing Photoshop, the most flexible image editor available. But at more than £500, it's out of reach of most home users. With a price tag of £80, Paint Shop Pro is still a serious investment, but with a long list of new tools added in this version, it promises to be a major upgrade on the bundled freebies.

One of the first pointers to this flexibility is the number of tools available on screen. In Paint Shop Pro 8, these were made less cumbersome by allowing the various tool palettes to 'dock' on the right-hand side of the screen, minimising down to a discreet tab. This keeps the main workspace fairly free of clutter. The only other major addition to the program's interface is a History palette. This keeps a record of previous changes, enabling you to step backwards to undo unwanted changes.

While Photoshop will still be the choice of professionals, Paint Shop Pro's sophisticated

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tools make it a very good choice for serious hobbyists. The last version included innovations aimed at digital photographers, such as effective fixes for the lens distortion that afflicts zoom photos. The new version ups the ante by adding lighting effects - most notably 'Backlight' and 'Flash Fill' filters, which are useful for correcting tricky lighting situations, where subjects often come out under-exposed. Version 9 also adds support for RAW images - the massive, uncompressed files produced by professional-level digital cameras.

Digital photographers aren't the only ones well served by Jasc's updates. A range of tools for PC-based artists makes the program more well-rounded than its predecessor. New brushes including oil paints and pastels have been added. These enable you to trace over a photo, making the image look like a hand-done drawing or painting, with a choice of preset or custom brushstroke styles. The impression of working with 'real' paint is taken further by the Mixer palette. This lets you mix together dabs of colour, just like an artist's palette.

It's partly because Pain Shop Pro 9 tries to be all things to all people that Paint Shop Pro isn't as easy to use as its arch-rival, the £70 cut-down Photoshop offshoot, Photoshop Elements 3. But, once you've found your way around the palettes and pop-up menus, there is help on specific projects in the newly-expanded Learning Centre palette.

For ease of use, we'd still recommend the simpler tools and easier interface of Photoshop Elements 3. If you've no need for Paint Shop Pro's new paint tools, the previous version is still an attractive option - it now comes bundled with Paint Shop Photo Album 5, in the £65 Paint Shop Pro Studio. If, on the other hand, you want versatility and a range of tools to let you expand your creative repertoire, nothing at this price can touch it.