Introduction

    WSKA, the European editor of Paint Shop Pro, sent us for review the latest version of the well known picture editing program. If PaintShop Pro started its career as a Shareware, the small Shareware has now grown into a mature essential picture application thousands of users work with daily, worldwide. In the world of picture editing program PaintShop Pro is often considered as the smaller sibling of PhotoShop from Adobe. If PaintShop Pro is approximately five times cheaper than PhotoShop it doesn’t mean it has no image editing power under the hood. In fact the main advantage of PaintShop Pro that turns it into a must have software is its lightness: indeed the software is very fast and can perform common tasks much faster than PhotoShop. Thus many graphic artists have on their workstations the heavy-duty PhotoShop and the small PaintShop Pro as we can say both programs are finally very complementary. Over the years PaintShop Pro has dramatically extended his field of application by adding many features to the application, such as layers support, animated GIF editor, etc. If PaintShop Pro was already very complete, this new release of PaintShop Pro comes with several new features & enhancements aimed to ease your hard job. Below is the feature list of Paint Shop Pro 7:

• Retouch, repair, and edit photos with easy-to-use, high-quality, automatic photo enhancement features

• Create and optimize Web graphics with built-in Web tools and artistic drawing and text tools

• Design cool animations with Animation Shop 3 included free

• Easily add custom images to your home and business graphics projects

• Save time with productivity tools: grids, guides, alignment, and grouping

• Expand your creativity with over 75 special effects

• Share photos electronically with friends and family via e-mail, Web sites, and photo-sharing sites

Setup

    Installing Paint Shop Pro 7 is fast. The setup has been totally revamped and is now based on the Windows Installer engine in order to get the Windows 2000 compatibility certification. During the setup you can customize the components that’ll be installed and change the folder where files will be copied. When the setup completes you’re prompted to register the software over the Internet. Then you can reboot your computer (if you wish) and start using the long desired new version of Paint Shop Pro, right now.