The painting engine itself has been rewritten to give smoother control over your brushstrokes and it's now quite possible to do delicate work with the mouse, where before a graphics tablet might have been necessary.

Several new tools have been introduced and others have been enhanced, so they're equally useful to the casual photo retoucher and the professional digital artist. A couple of examples are the red-eye removal and erase-to-background tools. Red-eye removal calls up a two-pane dialogue, for editing on the left and preview on the right. After highlighting each eye in turn and selecting the colour and hue of your choice, the result can be a very natural looking pair of irises.

Erase-to-background enables you to paint away any part of a photo and leave just the unpainted parts as a foreground image. It's more intelligent than a simple eraser and detects line edges so works particularly well on high-contrast subjects. Other new tools include warp and mesh warp brushes.

A major new productivity feature is the scripting recorder, with which you can teach the program a task and get it to repeatedly run that sequence of operations. This is ideal if you want to convert a batch of files from one format to another or resize a series of images. --Simon Williams

Paint Shop Pro is a wonderful photo/design program you will ever wish for. It has most of the options of Photoshop the options that are missing you will never use anyway unless your a graphic designer.

You have a huge manual to look through but I recommend buying one of the many books available to learn the real basics. The best thing about this though is the help guide on the program its fantastic at showing you how to do something.

Paint Shop Pro is recommended to anyone after a great photo program I would even recommend it to Graphic designers. If you don't want to pay hundreds of pounds for Photoshop this program if for you it has everything that Photo Shop has and its a bargain!


Why pay any more?   July 4, 2004
 29 out of 30 found this review helpful

I had cut my teeth in the world of pixel pushing on the Amiga with Deluxe Paint (for those who remember). I had long intended to find a package to use on the PC and had expected to shell out for Adobe Photoshop. But after using Paintshop Pro at work I discovered this covered everything I would want to do.

You can achieve pretty much any aspect of digital graphics from vector constructions to photo touch up to web site graphics.

Now in version 8 this package is really coming of age.

I'm happy to recomend this and at the price it's a bargain.


Jasc Paint shop pro 8   February 5, 2004
 22 out of 23 found this review helpful

This is an excellent product, it has a learning centre to help you through various tasks, the red eye removal feature is very easy to use, you can also do the one step photo fix, which gives your photo's, picture's, projects a new lease of life, personally i don't think you need any experience with this, its all part of the learning process, I would however advise you that, if you are buying this product download a trial from jasc, and if you like come back here and buy, its much cheaper and easier than direct from jasc. I have had this product about 2 weeks now, and i have managed to make simple gif banners for my site, and auctions at Ebid, I have redesigned a picture of my daughter, in sepia, framed it, and split the photo. Also took a picture of the kids nativity, came out a bit worse for wear, although jasc solved that, finally you can make a banner, save it as a gif, then take it into another program, ie: selteco web animator and convert it into a .swf :)