Part 3: An overview of the last 8 releases of Paint Shop Pro

I took the time to install trial versions of the last eight Paint Shop Pro releases and wrote down my impressions:

Paint Shop Pro 6 (1999)


This version added new concepts such as vectors and made a step towards web graphics. Compared to PSP 5 it has almost the same look, but has major improvements in the layer and tool options palettes.

- Added vectors and preset shapes
- Added new types of bezier lines
- Increased maximum brush, feather and zoom values
- Improvements in the tool options and layer palette
- Added auto-roll palettes
- Added dozens of new effects and deformations
- Introduced watermarking and picture frames
- Added a specialized GIF and JPEG optimizer
- Added menu icons
- Rebuilt the text tool
- Brush quality and speed of rendering has been improved.
- Increased customizability by adding right-click options to toolbars
- Added new options to General program preferences.

Paint Shop Pro 7 (2000)


Version 7 made PSP ideal for web-graphics and built the core package of image filters. The most noticeable improvement was the new color palette.
- Rebuilt the color palette, added new “effect” and “photo” toolbars
- Introduced textures, patterns and gradients as color styles
- Improved the line and shape tools, added a scratch remover tool
- Added new vector editing options
- Added an image slicer and PNG optimizer
- Added advanced color adjustments like channel mixer, color balance, levels, etc.
- An explosion of new photo, 3d, artistic, geometric and texture effects. Added a total of 32 new effects and organized them into a separate “Effects” menu.
- Further improved customizability and added new general program settings
- Added new features to the text tool

Paint Shop Pro 8 (2003)

This is the most revolutionary PSP version to date. It has been rebuilt from scratch, and the result is simply spectacular. My hat goes off to the people who summoned up the courage to go through with such a task. There's a completely new interface, the core structure is the basis for all following versions and most of the toolbars, palettes, icons and menus have remained untouched to this day.

Advanced customization:
- all buttons can be moved
- custom toolbars and menus
- custom keyboard shortcuts
- docking
- new general program settings
- introduced button grouping

All toolbars and palettes have been rebuilt, the most important improvements being:
- the new tool options palette
- new layer palette
- new material palette (with more advanced settings for gradients and patterns)

New brush engine:
- higher brush quality
- new basic settings: thickness, blend mode, rotation, presets, brush styles
- advanced brush settings organized in a separate “brush variance palette”

- Added scripts and macros
- Added nearly 50 new effects, filters and photo adjustments, too many to list even the most important ones. This enormous collection of photo filters created in 2003 has remained almost unchanged to this day.
- Improved crop, zoom, selections, vector tools, line/shape tools

New (and quite essential) tools:
- background eraser
- warp brush
- perspective correction/straighten
- mesh warp

A huge list and I still feel like I've missed something...

Paint Shop Pro 9 (2004)


Though JASC was only months away from being taken over by Corel, they still managed to fit in some important things. This last genuine JASC version tried to offer something new both to digital painters and photo editors.

- Added a history palette to complement the recently added scripts and macros
- The only genuinely new tool PSP9 introduced was the art media brush that simulated natural painting instruments: oil brushes, chalks, crayons, etc. Though they they lacked realism and I never used them in any real work, the art media brushes were a good technical exercise, maybe a prototype for something better. Sadly, it never got past the prototype phase. For their technical complexity and sheer amount of different settings, the art media brushes deserve our interest.
- Improved the preset shapes tool by adding custom symmetric shapes
- The color palette is a bit more intuitive
- Minor improvements in the interface, such as tabbed documents
- Four new filters

Paint Shop Pro 10 (2005) rebranded as Corel Paint Shop Pro X


This version is pretty much the same as PSP9, except for some memory and cache leak fixes, which actually makes it the last “good” release of PSP and the version I'm recommending if you don't know which one to choose. It uses a bit less memory than PSP9, far less memory than all the next versions and is basically the same program.

- The only real addition to PSPX is the makeover tool, combining “blemish fixer”, “toothbrush” and “suntan”, which are essentially super easy to use, but low quality proxies for clone brush, burn and dodge.
- Added a gray color theme as default. Thankfully, this can be disabled.
- Minor improvements to four or five existing filters.
- I've also noticed a bug fix when saving your workspaces

Paint Shop Pro 11 (2006) rebranded as Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI


This version looks exactly the same as PSPX, but uses more resources and installs the service “PSIService.exe”, which can be classified as spyware and doesn't uninstall along with PSP. And as if the name Paint Shop Pro wasn't already a tongue-twister, Corel decided to add the word “Photo” on top of it all.

- Skin smoothing – a filter that uses the algorithm as Digital Camera noise removal with the exact same effect.
- Color changer tool – perhaps the only real improvement in this version. Like the makeover tool, it's a point-and-click tool that's supposed to be very easy. It has some flaws and doesn't always work, but it can actually be useful.
- Time machine filter – builds on and combines some older filters into a “time machine” that ages your photos. After “thinify”, “toothbrush” and “time machine”, I'm actually waiting for a new PSP filter that doesn't try to impress people with its name.
- Built-in photo organizer which I don't believe belongs in a graphics editor.

Paint Shop Pro 12 (2007) and 12.5 (2008) (Paint Shop Pro Photo XII Ultimate)


I'm reviewing these two together because like I mentioned before, 12 and 12.5 are virtually the same program, the only difference being that 12.5 has an even longer name, “Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XII Ultimate” and offers a bunch of toys like USB sticks, more picture tubes, etc. Like PSP 11, they also install PSIService.exe, as well as the new and completely unnecessary background program MediaCataloger.exe

- For the fifth version in a row, there are no real improvements of the interface, unless you count the “Graphite” color scheme, which is annoying, but can be turned off.
- Express lab – a built-in photo enhancement program with just the most basic of features like brightness, crop, rotate, etc.
- Thinify and eye drops – more tools built especially for the amateur – Corel's new target customer.
- The new resize window is more advanced and overall it's a good addition, but it's twice as large as the old one and can't remember its settings.

Here's a comparison of approximate memory usage.



So as you can see, since being acquired by Corel, Paint Shop Pro has stopped offering much in terms of new features and is on the fast track to becoming bloatware. It's now getting obvious that PSP is becoming progressively worse and sooner or later this will lead to a fast withdrawal of users (if it hasn't already). What PSP needs is a major overhaul like the one in 2001-2003. That's why I'll be dedicating the next two parts to that idea.

NEXT - Part 4: A list of badly needed improvements

Part 2: The soda market

Innovation is always a risk, and risk is not what major corporations desire, especially if they already have a steady customer base. So why innovate at all?

That's a question I don't really have an answer to. Change equals risk, improvement requires effort and resources. Marketing a constantly bloating old product is easy (that's what ACD Systems did with ACDSee until free alternatives took its place). It's easier to hire an artist to make more picture stamps and let the marketeers think of new tools, than let the actual artist work on the artist's tools. For the last five years, the very few improvements Corel actually brought to PSP obviously weren't done by graphics specialists, but rather by marketing people who thought the program should appeal to certain focus groups. For example, by renaming Paint Shop Pro to Paint Shop Pro Photo, and then adding an “Ultimate” on top, Corel tried to target the growing number of amateur photographers. In the age of digital cameras it makes sense, however, instead of improving the existing photo-editing features in PSP or adding anything original, they decided to keep the old features untouched and embed a strange and quite amateurish “Express photo lab” into the core program, thus bloating it even further. Aside from the frequent name changes, Paint Shop Pro received several cosmetic makeovers: changing the color scheme from system Windows colors to a dull gray and finally a depressing dark scheme, without making any actual improvements to the interface.

Ironically, among the very few actual improvements under the “new Corel administration” were the make-up tools, such as tanning brushes, tooth whiteners, skin-smoothers, symbolic of the fact that Paint Shop Pro has been getting make-up jobs, while it really needed serious plastic surgery. Some of these tools were practically useless, like the “thinify” tool, which is supposed to make people look thinner by squeezing the image width.

The latest version, “Ultimate”, a.k.a. 12.5 relied entirely on marketing gimmicks to fool people into thinking it's a new product. As if out of desperation, Corel decided to stuff the PSP package with old software like Painter Essentials and additional toys such as new photo frames, picture tubes, and even a free USB stick. It's like Corel took a good look at all the stuff they had lying around the room, stuffed it into a box and put it up for sale. I wouldn't mind all that if I knew that Corel was secretly working on a radically improved next version, but I know they're not.

And thus we come to the main point I'm trying to make in this blog. Corel has been sleeping on the job for five years now, and it's about time they woke up and did a major overhaul. PSP can't keep on changing names and color styles, and eating up more resources while offering nothing more than it did five years (and five releases) ago. I've heard too many PSP users switch to Photoshop or say that they're sticking to PSP 7 or 8 because the newer ones take up too much resources without offering anything new and original. That's one of the reasons I started this peculiarly themed blog and maybe someday, when something original comes out, the time will come to take it down.

NEXT – Part 3: An overview of the last 8 releases of Paint Shop Pro

Part 1: The risk of innovation

It's always a beautiful thing when a small, ambitious software studio sets a goal to challenge the giants in a certain field, and through tremendous effort and innovative thinking, succeeds in creating a wonderful product that's a viable, cheaper and more functional alternative to the established leader in that field. As if to mock the giants, these small software studios prove that when you're small and the odds are against you, you have one important advantage: the freedom to make everything from scratch without thinking too much about standards, marketing strategies and what the customer expects from you. It's your goal to surprise the world with something never seen before, to show them how you like to do things. This is the story of “just another software company”... literally. The story of JASC software, and their brainchild – Paint Shop Pro.

Paint Shop Pro was a program that I discovered in 1998, when I was thirteen years old. I was so amazed by what it could do, and with what ease. I was so fascinated that it became almost an obsession. I can now say with good certainty that Paint Shop Pro was the program that got me interested in graphic design and perhaps defined my career from that point on. As I began to master the program, I also started comparing it with its main rival, Adobe Photoshop, which just like today, was the undisputed leader and trend-setter in the field, a noun, a verb and a synonym for graphic design. But it surprised me that for something so legendary, Photoshop had some features that were incredibly counter-intuitive compared to PSP. To this day, as if to preserve the tradition, Photoshop is still very counter-intuitive in many places such as Selection tools, clone stamps, background eraser, warp/smudge, vector tools and still lacks the interface customization capabilities of PSP. The Paint Shop Pro v/s Photoshop discussion is a vast subject, but from my experience, a well-mastered PSP could achieve an equal or better result than Photoshop at a fraction of the time, the cost and the system resources. It's true that PSP never did catch up with Photoshop in fields such as CMYK/print handling, digital painting/brush quality and cross-platform compatibility, but that wasn't enough to sway my opinion. I've managed to use Paint Shop Pro professionally, and even win many Photoshop contests, not to prove anything, but simply because for me PSP was clearly the better product.

Paint Shop Pro started out as a small project by Robert Voit, an airline pilot who wrote code as a hobby between flights, and whose hobby was so passionate that he managed to create a multi-million dollar enterprise around his signature product, Paint Shop Pro. The program was conceived two years after Adobe Photoshop, but with their smaller and more motivated staff, JASC software not only caught up, but outpaced Adobe by one full release by the year 2000. What amazed me most wasn't the quantity of the new releases, but the amount of improvements JASC always managed to fit in each year. It was like every version since 4.0 onwards was completely rewritten from scratch to make the software radically different from the previous version, but without adding anything unnecessary. Because the creators of PSP obviously put in so much thought and effort into the new interface and features, for more than seven years Paint Shop Pro was like an annual Christmas present that I couldn't wait to open, each year offering a thousand little surprises that I couldn't wait to uncover. The spirit of genuine joy however was slowly frozen by the cold hard reality that so many promising programs faced before – corporate takeover. At first, when I learned that JASC had been acquired by Corel, I tried to push away the intrusive thought that PSP would be ruined, killed off, or turned into bloatware. I even held the naïve belief that Corel could combine the great painting features in Painter with the editing power of PSP, fix some obvious CMYK and interface issues, thus creating the ultimate rival to Photoshop that would turn the market around. Sadly, I may have overestimated Corel's dedication to product quality, because as it turned out, the future of Paint Shop Pro was to be very grim. It could be best compared to that of a brand of soda: the endless desperate overmarketing of an old recipe.

NEXT - Part 2: The soda market