Product Reviews

Jasc's flagship software, Paint Shop Pro 9, is an extremely powerful photo-editing program, and it's very good value at under £100. However, it's more expensive than its arch rival, Adobe's Photoshop Elements, and just as important, it's not as easy to use. Photoshop Elements may have borrowed all its main editing tools from the full professional version of Photoshop, but Adobe also realised that it needed to redesign the interface to make it easy for beginners to understand.

Jasc seems to have realised that it must do something similar, and has released Paint Shop Pro Studio, a less expensive version of Paint Shop Pro. Unfortunately, it hasn't learnt all its lessons from Photoshop Elements.

To bring the program's price down to below £70 (the same as Photoshop Elements), Jasc has removed a number of Paint Shop Pro's more complicated features, such as histograms and batch processing. That's perfectly reasonable, but Jasc has missed the point in failing to tackle ease of use.

Adobe completely redesigned the interface for Elements, but Jasc has merely tinkered with the design of the original, with the result that Paint Shop Pro Studio doesn't look or feel much different to Paint Shop Pro.

When you launch Paint Shop Pro Studio for the first time, an introductory window gives you a quick tour of the program's main features before dropping you straight into the main workspace. At first glance this looks just like Paint Shop Pro, with

ADVERTISEMENT

an assortment of toolbars and palettes cluttering up the workspace. Admittedly there's a useful Quick Guide palette on the left-hand side of the screen that contains a number of tutorials for beginners. There's another set of palettes over on the right-hand side of the screen as well, which leaves only a small area for you to open and view your photos.

Thankfully you can rearrange the toolbars and palettes to make the workspace a little tidier, although they don't always behave as you'd expect. Each palette has an Auto Hide button but, instead of hiding the selected palette, it makes it bigger and hides all the other palettes beneath it. There's no equivalent of Elements' Quick Fix mode, which hides almost all the main tools and leaves just a few automated controls for adjusting settings such as brightness, contrast and colour balance.

Admittedly Paint Shop Pro Studio provides a similar set of automated tools, but even these are presented in a rather untidy fashion. There's a set of auto tool icons in the main toolbar that runs across the top of the workspace, but next to these is a pull-down menu containing the same set of tools, so the same tools appear twice in the same toolbar.

Paint Shop Pro Studio also includes a separate Album program for organising collections of photos, creating projects such as calendars and greetings cards and assembling groups of pictures into slideshows. Oddly, this program has a different interface that's very similar to that of Photoshop Elements. It's very simple and easy to get to grips with, and makes us wonder why Jasc didn't go the whole hog and apply the same approach to the main editing tools in Paint Shop Pro Studio.

As it is, interface design remains Paint Shop Pro Studio's main weakness, and the streamlined interface of Photoshop Elements will be more attractive to newcomers who don't have much experience of photo-editing work. Having said that, Jasc was recently taken over by Corel, so it will be interesting to see what changes Corel makes to the program in coming months.