Paint Shop Pro has come a long way. Once a shareware favourite among cost-conscious amateurs, it became a commercial package with version five and has evolved through recent versions to become a powerful mid-range graphics package.

Let’s take a closer look at the art media tools first. There are two interesting innovations to begin with. One is a selection of natural media ‘brushes’, including Oil, Chalk, Pastel, Crayon, Colored Pencil and Marker tools. Another is the new Mixer palette that works just like a real artist’s palette in that you can ‘squeeze’ paint colours on to it and mix them with a palette knife until you get the colours you want. It’s a nice idea, though maybe Jasc is trying a little too hard to mimic real-life art techniques. Computer keyboards, monitors, mice and virtual palettes like this are a far cry from the real thing, and it’s simply not possible to duplicate the ‘feel’ of real media.

Although there are signs that Paint Shop Pro is a little quicker than it was (Histogram Adjustments, for example, seem to produce image updates faster), if you work on a 300dpi A4-sized canvas with larger brush sizes, the paint engine does struggle to keep up. You spend as much time waiting as you do brushing.

The new Art Eraser does, it’s true, remove paint and other media more realistically from your canvas, and the new Image Tracing option is an interesting, if time-consuming, way of painting from photographic images, but Paint Shop Pro 9 still isn’t quite convincing as a natural media tool. It’s not in the same league as Corel Painter.

Digital photography
On the digital photography side, Jasc has been busy. You get the impression the company’s been playing catch-up with Photoshop, as well as introducing innovative new photo correction tools. One of the most important new features is support for RAW files produced by a number of popular digital cameras from Canon, Fujifilm, Kodak, Minolta, Olympus and Pentax.

Paint Shop Pro’s browser can render RAW image thumbnails, and if you double-click on a thumbnail, the software displays a conversion dialog where you can choose a white balance preset, a sharpening level and an exposure compensation value. It’s useful but also limited and is a long way from the extensive RAW conversion options in Photoshop CS. But you have to remember that Paint Shop Pro will be on sale for a fraction of the price, and that RAW file conversion is something none of its direct rivals (price-wise) offer.

There are new digital photo enhancement filters, too. The Digital Camera Noise Removal tool ‘intelligently preserves’ image detail while reducing the speckling effect of high ISO values. You can control the trade-off between noise reduction and quality loss. A Fill Flash filter attempts to correct underexposed shadows, and it does this quite well, though there does tend to be a trade-off in mid-tone contrast, which is typical of this kind of tool. The new Backlight filter is designed to darken overexposed backgrounds, but given that digital cameras will often produce completely ‘blown’ highlights, this tool may not always help.

Probably the most interesting addition is the Chromatic Aberration Removal filter. This tackles the colour fringing caused by lens aberrations (where the lens can’t bring different colours to a focus at the same point), and also sensor ‘blooming’ from gross overexposure of light areas. Like certain other existing Paint Shop Pro tools, this is effective but also complex. You need to zoom in on an affected area, select a small area containing the false colour and then modify Radius and Range values to tell Paint Shop Pro how thick the colour fringes are, and also specify the colour variations. Images can contain more than one type of colour fringing, and this new tool enables you to set up to ten different colour samples. It’s remarkably effective, it has to be said, but time-consuming, too, because Paint Shop Pro 9 appears no quicker at rendering previews of image corrections than its predecessor. You can at least save your settings, so that other images from the same camera can be fixed quickly.

There’s another big change in Paint Shop Pro 9 that deserves close examination, and this is the brand new History palette. Its previous command history window was distinctly lame compared to Photoshop’s history options, but now each editing step gets an icon and a visibility icon. Not only can you undo editing steps back to specific points but, in many cases, you can disable past editing actions without undoing subsequent ones. For example, you could show/hide a past saturation adjustment without affecting a more recent sharpening operation.

This is very clever, though Paint Shop Pro 9 still has no equivalent of Photoshop’s Snapshot tool. As we’ve said before, of course, Photoshop is a much more expensive program, and Paint Shop Pro is giving you a lot of its functionality for a lot less cash.

Browser and interface changes
Paint Shop Pro’s Browser has been updated to show EXIF and file data, and it now enables you to sort thumbnails by EXIF data fields, like shutter speed, lens aperture or white balance. Drawing tools have been modified to make Bezier shapes simpler to create and edit, and the text tool can now create vertical text and offers better anti-aliasing at small text sizes. The interface has seen more development too, to the point where practically all the control palettes can be stacked and docked, Adobe-style, at the screen edge.

Competitive edge
There’s no doubt that Paint Shop Pro 9 boasts some highly significant improvements over version eight, but does this make it the best image-editor/graphics package you can get? Not quite. It’s still too slow when working on larger digital image files, and both Photoshop and Elements are significantly quicker at most everyday tasks. This in itself makes Paint Shop Pro start to grate on your nerves.

It’s a bit fussy and complex, too. Nothing is ever straightforward, from the existing Manual Color Correction dialog to the new Chromatic Aberration Removal filter. In many instances, in an effort to make Paint Shop Pro’s tools more sophisticated, Jasc has also made them so complex as to put off all but the most determined or expert photographers.

This program’s two key words have to be ‘power’ and ‘value’. It does almost as much as Adobe Photoshop while costing almost as little as Photoshop Elements (though Elements is inexpensive now – perhaps a better comparison would be Ulead PhotoImpact). However, it’s not as fast or as straightforward as either.

Beginners are likely to be better off with the speed and simplicity of Photoshop Elements, and once they’ve outgrown it, Photoshop is the next logical choice. Good though it is, Paint Shop Pro 9 somehow falls between two stools. Superfically, it’s a highly versatile, powerful program. Get below the surface, though, and it starts to feel slow and complicated.