8 Ways to Sunday

I’ve been using Paint Shop Pro 8 as my primary image editor for over a year now, and have been very happy with it. I recently downloaded the trialware version of Adobe’s famous (and famously expensive) Photoshop CS specifically for a major scanning and restoration project, and was very impressed with its capabilities. I’ve been planning to start writing reviews on this weblog for awhile now, so I decided I may as well start with an informal head-to-head of these two excellent products.

Paint Shop Pro began as a simple shareware image viewer and converter. With each new release, it has become an increasingly powerful image editing tool. This latest version of PSP has improved tremendously over its predecessors. The clunky interface and ugly icons that were the last vestiges of its shareware roots have been shed in favor of a completely revamped UI which easily tops both Photoshop and Photoshop Elements of user-friendly utility. It’s also grown new some new talents since version 7 and features some readily accessible tools — such as straighten, perspective correction, and pincushion and barrel distortion correction — that are either absent or hard to find in the Adobe products.

One area where PSP8 is lacking is its JPEG compression algorithms. Any compression level over 5 (i.e. 95% quality) produces unacceptable compression artifacts. When I want to save images in the JPEG format, I copy and paste them into the GIMP, an open source image editor. GIMP has the best JPEG tools I’ve ever seen, even better than Photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop: so synonymous with image editors and editing that it’s been verbbed, no discussion of modern computer graphics applications can carry on for long without this program’s name being mentioned. It’s the industry standard, and a touchstone for all competitors, for good reason.

The quality of Photoshop’s toolset sets the pace for this category of software, even as the program’s learning curve has become steeper with every release. Shunning simplicity for power — and favoring multi-purpose buttons, floating pallets, and keyboard shortcuts over friendlier interface conventions — Photoshop is the graphics professional’s power tool. However, some of its features and benefits are readily discernable with only casual use.

The unsharp mask filter in Photoshop is second to none, and has produced crisply focused images from scans I thought were impossible to salvage. The highlight/shadow tool and healing brush are nothing short of magic. Highlight/shadow does an amazing job of pulling detail out of the shadowed areas of underexposed pictures or recovering details lost in the blown highlights of overexposed shots. The healing brush is like the clone stamp tool with a brain. It paints a sampled area over another part of the image, just like the clone stamp, but it also makes an effort to compensate for highlights, shadows, and changes of line and color. It’s perfect for removing scratches and dust from scanned prints and negatives, or for correcting digital-specific problems like the sensor dust that plagues dSLRs. To my knowledge, neither of these tools is included in the consumer-oriented Photoshop Elements.

So which tool is right for you? It boils down to budget and needs. If you’re a professional photographer or a graphic designer who needs to do pre-press work, you’re better off with Photoshop. It’s the industry standard, and it incorporates excellent pre-press and professional workflow tools. If you’re an amateur or hobbyist photographer, or if you simply don’t have $600 to blow on an image editor, go for PSP. It’s an excellent piece of software that’s easy to learn, fun to use, and full of utility.

The following ratings are from my perspective as a hobbyist photographer:

Paint Shop Pro ($84 download / $94 boxed)

• Ease of Use: 9/10
• Features: 9/10
• Value: 10/10
• Final Rating: 9/10

Adobe Photoshop CS ($649 full / $169 upgrade)

• Ease of Use: 8/10
• Features: 10/10
• Value: 7/10
• Final Rating: 8/10