The creation of Paint Shop Pro (PSP) started as a simple shareware bitmap editor. But over the years of development and upgrade, it has transformed itself into a professional photo editor that gives even Photoshop a run for its money.
Development continues in this latest release with a number of added features aimed at the high-end digital camera user. To start with, PSP’s image browser window now offers an Info palette to show the EXIF data, such as aperture and exposure that modern cameras automatically store with their images. PSP 9 now also supports the unprocessed RAW sensor data captured by professional cameras and lets you set customized white balance, exposure and sharpening settings for import.
Paint Shop Pro 9
Paint Shop Pro 9 offers a brand new twist to your printing experience by adding a number of new enhancement filters: Digital Camera Noise Removal intelligently removes the noise evident in digital camera shots. This noise is the side effect of the Sensor that collects the digital information every time you take a shot; Chromatic Aberration Removal eliminates the occasional undesirable colored glow around objects that digital cameras cannot filter; Fill Flash corrects underexposed shadows; and Backlighting corrects over-exposed highlights. Two new special effect filters have also been added in the form of Displacement Map for creating 2D and 3D surface distortions based on an underlying image and Radial Blur for creating spin, twist and zoom blur effects. And when it comes to outputting your photos with PSP’s excellent Print Layout dialog, you can now add freeform text captions to your printouts.
Paint Shop Pro 9’s most common role is handling and enhancing existing photos, although the program is also capable of originating images from scratch. And it isn’t limited to bitmaps either as PSP pioneered the use of vector layers to provide integrated drawing capabilities. With Paint Shop Pro 9 these are enhanced with new Rectangle and Oval tools (previously these were available as presets), and simpler handling for the Pen tool. Completely new are the Symmetric Shape tool, designed for adding customizable polygon and star shapes, and new Text tool options for producing vertical text and improving the rendering of smaller font sizes.
Beside its amazingly impressive drawing capabilities, Paint Shop Pro 9 adds completely new art-based painting functionality clearly inspired by the market leader, Corel Painter. Additional feature that version 8 does not have, is the new Art Media layers on which you can paint with a range of new natural media tools – Oil, Chalk, Palette Knife, Pastel, Crayon, Colored Pencil, and Marker – each designed to closely mimic its real world counterpart. Using the Oil Brush tool, for example, as you drag onscreen the multi-bristled brush lays down multiple pigments that interact with both the underlying paint and canvas texture until the brush stroke realistically runs out of paint.
This addition aims to make working with the Art Media tools feel like working with traditional artist’s tools, an idea reinforced by Paint Shop Pro 9 new traditional-style Mixer. Like a real artist’s palette this new dockable palette provides an off-canvas area in which you can add, mix and then sample your paint ready to apply. Alternatively you can set the color that your art media tool applies to trace which means that the underlying color is automatically sampled when you first begin painting – ideal for producing an artistic version of an existing photograph.
With all this new additions Paint Shop Pro 9 in store for you, you can never have any second though of having this latest version of PSP. This PSP gives ease while using, value for money, and added features that will surely delight all. And thus, Paint Shop Pro 9 is the image editor of any digital photographer’s dreams.
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