I have had the pleasure of using both Adobe Photoshop and Jasc Paint Shop Pro. Both are powerful, enjoyable products that are worth their money, but only JASC is at a price that a mere mortal can afford to shell out. Pound for pound Paint Shop Pro provides most all of the features that you will find with Photoshop and a few that you will not find, such as the Animation creator.

As in Photoshop there are the standard guides, grouping and grids that allow you easy control over your images. Also like Photoshop, Paintshop comes with dozens of special effects such as blur, sephia, and embross.

You can try Paintshop Pro for a 30 day trial period (actually it is 2 months because the program will continue to work until the 60th day). Two months of using Paintshop will certainly be enough time for you to choose it over other products that cost three or four times as much, as well as products that cost less but off a fraction of the utilities that Paintshop offers. If you are looking for free then check out Gimp+ but if you don't mind paying for what you get, then you will get your money's worth out of Jasc Paintshop Pro.

The only Con that really comes to mind from using Paintshop is that unlike PhotoShop masking (selecting a area on an image) is a little more difficult. You may want to test this out during your trial time.



Recommended: Yes