Smile UK Store - Paint Shop Pro 8

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!

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.

Over the last few years I have become increasingly interested in digital photography, and finally decided to invest in some decent software to allow me to manipulate the images I was creating with the camera. Naturally my choice came down to either Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop. Having tried Photoshop, I didn't find it as intuitive as PSP (although this may be due to the previous experience I had). So PSP8 it was, and I wasn't disappointed (especially considering the price difference between the two).

PSP8 builds on the very firm foundations of its predecessors and has all manner of whizzy gadgets to allow you to get the very best from all your images. As I have mentioned, use it alot for photo retouching and find it has ample tools to allow me to do everything I need. The 'one touch' feature is very good and much of the time this is all that is required, but if you have a creative flare there is much more beneath the surface. All in all a very good value product, very intuitive to use and capable of very professional results.