Product Reviews

JASC's Paint Shop Pro (PSP) began life as bargain shareware but since then has moved so far up-market it has become the only serious rival to Adobe's Photoshop. With Paint Shop Pro Studio, JASC returns to its roots with a budget application designed for the occasional user and, in particular, the digital camera owner.

In this area of the market, ease of use is a paramount concern, and PSP Studio offers a perfunctory Get Started Fast dialog that appears on startup, as well a more practical tutorial-based Learning Center, which runs down the left of the screen by default. Otherwise, apart from a slightly different (and much more attractive) colour scheme, the interface and working environment is effectively identical to Paint Shop Pro's. It doesn't compete in complexity with higher-end applications, but new users will still find it daunting initially.

That's because there's a lot of power to come to terms with. All PSP's main tools are here, including the excellent Image Hose and even the vector-based Pen and Shape tools. The main Materials and Layers palettes are also included to let you choose a colour or texture to paint with, and to manage your photo compositions. And there's

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no shortage of Adjust commands to enhance your photos and Effect filters to give them a creative edge. In fact, with so many familiar PSP features present, from the thumbnail-based File Browser to the Print Layout dialog, it's initially difficult to see what power is missing.

Look more closely and the omissions become apparent. As Studio is largely based on PSP 8, most of the new features from the latest PSP 9 haven't been included. That means the vector options are limited to the Preset Shape tool, there are none of the new Art Media brushes, or the excellent History palette with its selective undo. Advanced features such as scripting, layer masks and CMYK support have also been axed, along with around half of the Adjust and Effect filters.

Thankfully, JASC has done a good job of identifying which features occasional users will benefit from and which they won't. In many ways PSP Studio actually benefits from the rationalisation - for example, now that there are 28 core adjustment filters rather than 56, the average user is much more likely to make use of them rather than run screaming. In any case, JASC more than makes up for the lost high-end power by bundling the standard edition version of PSP Album 5. This provides many of the features that the average digital camera user is looking for and, with the option to quickly load images into PSP Studio whenever PSP Album's in-built editing power isn't enough, the two apps work well together.

JASC has done enough of a good job that many beginners and existing Paint Shop Pro users will be tempted to jump ship to Studio. The only trouble for JASC is that Adobe's Photoshop Elements 3 manages to provide even more professional-level power for around the same price, complete with superb photo management.