Paint Shop Pro is one of the most popular image editors out
there. Even though it's increasingly geared towards digital
photography, you'd be surprised just how useful it can be to web
designers.
Installing Paint shop Pro is pretty much a "no brainer". You put
the CD in and choose "install". The only recommendation I have
regarding installation is that you might want to change the
folder where it installs. If you let it auto install, the
program will install in C:/Program Files/JASC/Paint Shop Pro.
That's buried pretty deep and can be a real pain if you need to
visit the folder where the program in installed. I have mine
installed in C:/Paint Shop Pro.
Features.
So what features does Paint Shop Pro have? Well, for a start, it
supports just about every image format there has ever been. It
can 'smart fix' photos, to sort out any brightness and colour
issues, but you can still adjust everything about your images
manually if you want to. You get 'picture tubes', tiny little
pieces of stock photography that can spice up your designs.
You also get all sorts of 'arty' effects that can make your
images look like they were drawn in oils or chalk, and you can
even create authentic looking black and white pictures. The
selection tools are second to none, letting you select areas
freehand, by shape, or using other factors like colour and
brightness. PSP is especially good at removing foreground
elements from their backgrounds, and letting you combine one
image with another using layers.
Finally, of course, all the basics are there - resize, crop,
rotate, blur, and so on. Resizing works especially well, giving
a much smoother result than lots of other graphics editors do.
In the latest version, PSP tries hard to make everything it can
'one step' or 'one click', which is quite a relief to those of
us who've been using it for a while - with each version, the
program gets easier to learn and use as well as a little more
powerful.
Logos and Navigation.
Paint Shop Pro excels when it comes to producing logos and
navigation elements.
Its text tools let you produce smooth, anti-aliased text in your
favourite font, and position it exactly the way you want to
create a logo. You'd be surprised how many good effects you can
get by rotating your text, and PSP has an excellent feature that
lets you curve your text around any shape you want to.
When it comes to navigation, PSP's font functions excel again:
it's dead easy to copy one navigation element as many times as
you want and add different text to it each time, thanks to the
program letting you edit text as much as you like even once it's
been placed into the image.
Producing Mockups.
I have to admit, though, that my favourite thing to use Paint
Shop Pro for is producing mockups. It's so easy to create the
boxes and text that make up a web page, and paste it any images
you might need. You can have an accurate image of your website
ready within ten minutes or so, and save it in a format your web
browser can view, so you can get a better idea of what it would
look like 'for real'.
Even better, once you come up with a mockup you like, you can
select parts of it to save and use them in the final version, in
whatever image format you want. Once you know a little CSS, you
can do most of your design work in PSP, using HTML and CSS as
the glue that holds your image-based site together.
Photoshop Plugins.
Finally, one of the most notable things about Paint Shop Pro is
that it supports Photoshop's plugins, giving you access to a lot
of the features Photoshop users rely on without having to
actually shell out for Photoshop. Of course, Paint Shop Pro has
plenty of plugins of its own available too.
Where Can I Get Paint Shop Pro?
Paint Shop Pro used to be shareware sold by its creators, Jasc,
but it's now owned by Corel (
www.corel.com). It sells for around
$50, which is a lot cheaper than anything comparable on the
market, yet it does everything that most users would ever want
it to do - the most recent version even adds CMYK, a big reason
why many people stayed with Photoshop. You may even already have
a copy, as plenty of computers and scanners come bundled with it
now. If you don't, though, you can download a 30-day free trial
from corel.com.
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