Review: Paint Shop Pro 8.0

I’ve had it installed for about 12 hours, and let me tell ya, I’m lovin’ the new version of Paint Shop Pro. I’ve been using PSP for about ten years, back to v3.0 I think. Back then it was the graphics program for anyone who didn’t need Photoshop’s bells and whistles. Now it’s the graphics program for anyone who needs more than Photoshop can do.
For the past four years I’ve used v5.03 at home, and v7.0 at work for the past couple of years. Why didn’t I upgrade at home? Because 7.0 was an unstable bitch of a program, crash-prone and notorious for losing settings. Too many times I seriously thought about sneaking 5.03 into work and installing it over the newer version. I loved some of 7.0’s new features, but the lack of stability meant that it was damned hard to use – and the workstation I use at work is a very stable Dell NT machine with more than enough memory overhead for 7.0.
8.0 barely fits both my available hard drive space and my available RAM – I’ll probably have to add some memory to really milk PSP8 for all it’s worth. But even on this machine, it’s very stable – the only crashes I’ve had were cases where I was trying to do something that simply exceeded the available memory capacity. The interface is a bit different, with the options toolbar now extended vertically across the top of the screen, but once you get used to that you can rock ‘n’ roll. There are a lot of new features very specifically geared toward photo restoration, including a red-eye eliminator which can de-demonize both human and animal eyes in photos – very cool trick. I won’t even begin to pretend to understand how it works, but it does.
PSP7 always pissed me off because older versions’ .PSP files couldn’t be read; PSP8 can read .PSP files generated by v7.0, v5.03, and everything else in between and before. JASC really did some homework before putting this puppy on the market – if you were ever honked off by PSP7, you’ll like this. Most all of the bugs have been fixed, and once you get used to various selectors being in different places, the interface is very intuitive.
Now I’m gonna go reinstall all my old plugins and have some fun.

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